globeandmail.com: Investigators can't find cause of Queen St. fire

Tuesday 28 October 2008 21:09 hrs

Something resembling a rough cut of the first segment of Heavy Metal Blues exists. But yet I feel ambivalent, and the situation remains grim.

To be sure, it’s exciting to be well placed and on the way to completing one’s first feature film.

But this project has taught me the full meaning of personal sacrifice. And while I don’t mind sacrifice, I feel that personal sacrifice is an exercise best left for other people.

So now comes one of those times for sober dotting of the I’s and reflective crossing of the tees.

This project started out as a whimsical attempt to document the Queen St. West area by presenting the redacted story of what at first I took to be redacted.

The basis for the film was there because this redacted evidently presided over an ongoing crime wave in the neighbourhood, a neighbourhood that on closer examination could be seen to be uncannily like the neighbourhood documented in Guy Ritchie’s brilliant Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. 

If you remember, this film featured a crew of lovable hustlers, their violently shady neighbours , some hapless dopeheads in over their heads, along with some serious ganster shit. 

In retrospect, once the facts on the ground became impossible to ignore, the prudent move would have been for me to shift my base of operations elsewhere. But the rent was cheap and I am a risk taker and the location was beyond beautiful for all sorts of reasons. And so I had pressed ahead with the film, my music and the life.

But then one morning a fire was reported to be burning down my studio. And this fire had subsequently grown until it disrupted transit, and attracted the whole fire department, the Ontario Fire Marshall and people flying overhead in helicopters.

And the beady eyed gaze of the 14 Division Criminal Investigative Bureau of the City of Toronto Police Service had been duly bent in the general direction of me and all my little buddies in the immediate vicinity of Queen and Bathurst.

It is a great irony that some stories simply cannot be told while police detectives try to follow the central plot and establish the narrative arc. And when I heard that a fire had broken on Queen Street, once it became clear which buildings were involved it also became crystal clear that the story of my little film was going to be untellable for the foreseeable future.

In fact, in those first hellish post fire hours and days, there was no certainty that the film and the fire were unrelated circumstances. After all, the fire had destroyed the viability of the original idea and the police were openly calling the place a crime scene.

When I started working on the movie, I never expected to be engaging in dark speculation with Detective Sergeants from the Police Service of Toronto, but that’s exactly what I found myself doing one cold March day in 2008, and at times subsequent as well.

So in this way my whimsical little film about a spray painted corner of downtown Toronto by necessity became a different version of itself.

It would be nice to know what made this spray painted Canadian version of a slum burn right down, but right now the chances of definitively answering the question seems remote. If the place succumbed to criminal activity, the trail is currently dormant, if not cold.

All that’s left are the celluloid memories, and a flattened pile of rubble.

Tags: queenstreet fire, lock stock and two smoking barrels,

 

 

Tuesday May 13, 2008 18:27 hrs

There are several important new pieces of information in the mix.

As usual, the sources of the information matter. The motives of the people supplying the information matter. As usual, the pertinence to the facts matter.

Now is not the time for censoring ideas. Nor is it the time to avoid pejorative thinking. Now is the time for cold beady eyed analysis.

A sober consideration of the circumstances surrounding the fire would have to include consideration of the possibility that the fire may have started by accident. By accident we mean that the fire may have started without any deliberate acts having been undertaken by any individuals currently known or unknown.

Next, is the possibility that the fire started as a result of negligence.

In this case the fire is assumed to be the result of acts taken or not taken, that would have prevented the outbreak of the fire.

The most sinister branch of this line of reasoning would posit that the fire began as a result of deliberate acts undertaken by individuals known or unknown. That is, the fire may have started as the result of an act of arson.

The standard saws of motive, means and opportunity do apply here.

No serious observers would consider this line of reasoning without a clear path of logic showing how the perpetrator of the arson would have had the motive, the means, and the opportunity.

All the necessary elements are not present to draw conclusions.

But scenarios that were previously improbable can now be shown to be in fact, quite probable.

Specifically, Adam Vaughan alluded to a certain  redacted who had been redacted the other redacted, while redacted that redacted

redacted statements open the possibility that this individual was not in fact redacted, but rather the redacted, by proxy, of redacted Queen Street West.

This would explain the oddity of redacted, who when redacted, did not know that the building had burned down.

If the putative tenant is actually redacted the property, then that would give him or her a motive for burning down the building. That motive is insurance money.

Further in this line of reasoning, if no one could easily prove redacted, the redacted could easily be seen to have an airtight alibi against accusations that he or she profited from the fire.

On the subject of the subject's means of starting the fire, one must consider redacted, and his alleged training redacted.

Did the subject have the knowledge to construct redacted device? It's hard to see how not.

As for opportunity, the subject had all the time in the world to redacted catastrophe. And catastrophe did come. On 20 February 2008, a fire destroyed 7 buildings, including one housing thousands of dollars of my equipment.

April 18 appeared on the calendar.

Like a ghost, redacted appeared to me on the street. She looked lost, and was reluctant to speak to me, and we exchanged only stiff hellos.

Soon, it would be two months after the Queen Street Fire of 2008, and still no cause had been announced by the fire department.

There were still many rumours in play, most of which continued to make no sense at all.

There were suggestions that redacted bore ultimate responsibility for the fire, either through direct acts, or failures to act.

There were suggestions that angry neighbours collaborated with the police to eliminate the problems associated with certain businesses and residents living in the fire zone.

There were suggestions that the fire had been set to consummate a real estate deal of some kind.

My favourite was the rat theory. In this scenario, a rodent with the word infamy written on its back, chewed through faulty wiring in the building, sufficiently to short out live wires, providing a source of ignition that resulted in the fire.

The most sinister, was a theory that supposed a disgruntled resident, with an axe to grind against redacted, started the fire whilst intoxicates with the fumes of the crack pipe. This theory worked nicely for me, because it explained the seeming irrationality of the act.

I found it difficult to see how the fire benefited anyone financially or otherwise. So if it had been deliberately set, then it must have been done by someone who was not well grounded in consensual reality when they committed the act.

As well, the possibility remained open, that a simple innocuous, accidental root cause had destroyed most of a city block in downtown Toronto on a cold, cold February morning. That would make the fire, almost routine.

But if this had been a routine fire, then a cause would have quickly been found and assigned to the event, wouldn’t it? But the smell on my coat two months later reminds me that this had been no routine fire.

And my last conversation with the lead investigator, had suggested to me that there were still questions at 14 Division, over what roles had been played by all the moving parts, in the events immediately leading up to time the fire was noticed and reported.