“The loss of a mother and her three-year-old daughter in the 2023 Jade Crescent fire is a tragedy that no family or community should ever have to endure. My heart remains with the families whose lives were forever changed. That tragedy reinforced something I had already been fighting for: when someone rents a home in Brampton, they deserve to know that home is safe. That is why I championed Brampton’s Residential Rental Licensing program. We needed a proactive system that gives the City stronger tools to identify risks, inspect properties and hold landlords accountable. Since establishing the RRL pilot in 2023, I have continued to push for stronger enforcement, better compliance measures, and the expansion of the program city-wide.
We should not have to learn from tragedies that could have been prevented. We need to identify risks before they become emergencies and use every tool available to protect residents. A rental property is not simply an business investment. It is someone’s home, and every resident deserves to feel safe behind their own front door. We cannot change what happened on Jade Crescent, but we can honour those we lost by refusing to accept preventable risks as simply the cost of doing business. A home should be a place of safety. Every Brampton resident deserves that.”
– Rowena Santos, Regional Councillor, Wards 1 & 5, Chair, Legislative Services and Community Services, City of Brampton