Opinion: A failure of regulation? Or just a fail.

Maxwell will have his say on the failure of our building community in Elliot Lake with the collapse of the Aglo Mall in the soon coming issue of Canadian Contractor. I’ll have a word here about the bizzar failure of a home under renovation in the west end of Toronto recently.

A Toronto Star story published a few weeks ago and found here did a good job of explaining what happened to a small home in Toronto while it was being underpinned. Though the story does not want to link the home’s drastic sudden collapse to the underpinning work for legal reasons (and neither do I) it is hard not to think about how renovations honestly approached can still go very wrong.

Close on the heels of the story came calls for better regulation and more oversight, and more tax money spent on both. Why can’t bad things happen without this kind of reaction? Somebody made a mistake. The house is going to be torn down. Someone’s insurance is going to pay for it. End of story.

Yes, news organizations need to fill pages and some opinionaters need something to say. Well, this opinionaiter wishes those opinionaiters could come up with something a little more creative than to spend my money and make more rules for Canadian Contractor readers to bow down to.