Tenant calls for licensing of asbestos testing companies after getting conflicting test results

A Winnipeg tenant who went through an ordeal over conflicting test results for asbestos in her rented home says Manitoba should bring in a law requiring licensing of companies that offer asbestos testing.

In January 2024, British Columbia became the first province to have a law that requires licensing of employers doing asbestos abatement work and certification of workers who do the work, including sampling and testing.

Tenant Laura Chase says Manitoba should do the same.

“Clearly the current situation is unsafe. It was unsafe in my case. And the fact that there’s so little accountability because there is no licence — a person can’t lose a licence that they don’t have in the first place,” Chase said in an interview. 

“So how can there be any kind of accountability in a system like this?”

She rents a unit in a fourplex built in the 1960s, a time when asbestos was widely used in a range of building materials, including insulation, tiles, drywall compound, ceiling tiles and window sealant.

Asbestos is a carcinogenic material and if it becomes airborne and is inhaled, it can cause fatal illnesses such as mesothelioma, asbestosis and lung cancer. The Workers Compensation Board has found asbestos exposure is the leading cause of death among workers in Manitoba, with 71 fatalities in the decade ending in 2023.

Chase’s home needed repairs, and in September 2022, the Residential Tenancies Branch (RTB) ordered the landlord to replace windows, fix the refrigerator and make various repairs to the bathroom, such as fixing the bathtub faucet and replacing drywall that had water damage.

WATCH | Tenant explains why licensing for asbestos testing is important:

In 2023, the property manager sent a representative to get samples for asbestos testing, and the results came back negative for “drywall plaster” in the bedrooms and beside the kitchen window, and negative for asbestos in fiberglass insulation.

The bathroom was not tested.

“Based upon the first tests that were done that were apparently negative, they went ahead and they started doing work,” Chase said.

However, Chase hired a testing company herself and a sample of the drywall joint compound on the ceiling of the bathroom came back positive for asbestos.

She subsequently got testing done for the drywall joint compound in the bedroom, and it was also positive for asbestos.  

“So after the windows were replaced and before the bathroom was renovated, I did the testing and I found the results were indeed positive, and that was alarming, because three windows had been replaced without any precautions,” she said.

After Chase got the positive asbestos test result, the RTB also had asbestos testing done for the wall and ceiling of the bathroom, and those test results were positive. 

Chase said that based on the positive asbestos tests, an environmental company was hired to do the bathroom renovation and proper remediation.

“It meant they had to enclose the entire area. Then they had to encapsulate the asbestos that was removed … to make sure that it was properly disposed of,” Chase said. That was followed by cleaning with use of high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters to make sure asbestos wasn’t in the air or on surfaces. 

CBC News contacted the landlord’s representative about the asbestos test results, but a spokesperson declined to discuss the case. 

When Chase decided to get her own asbestos testing done rather than rely on the property manager’s, she contacted Winnipeg firm J&D Environmental to get the samples for the tests.

“What you’re showing us here is actually an incredibly common issue,” said Danial Kolba, founder and president of J&D Environmental as well as the lab company Duracan Laboratory Group.

He has about 20 years experience related to asbestos work and consulting. 

“You get false negatives quite often on sites. And this is where you want competent people or consulting firms that actually know how to collect the sample, know where those samples should be collected from, and get you the most authentic data possible to determine if there’s asbestos in it,” he said.

“False negatives come up often, because not enough samples are being brought in to physically say this is a clean area or a clean room, or because the people collecting the sample just don’t actually know how to collect the sample.”

Kolba said he can’t speak specifically about the property manager’s sample collection in Chase’s home, because he’s not familiar with either the house or the company that provided samples for the property manager. 

It’s important to make sure the company doing the sample collection for asbestos testing is a third party, independent from the contractor doing renovation work, he said.

“I probably see more often in the industry, a lot of the contractor doing the work bringing in and doing their own sampling,” he said.

Kolba agrees with Chase’s view that there should be licensing in Manitoba for companies that do asbestos sampling and testing, but he says current companies that are competent should not be put out of business.

“I think there should be a licensing in place, but I think it should be a fair licensing that is attainable without forcing a company to shut down or because they don’t have a four-year diploma or something like that,” he said. 

It’s critical that the government holds the people doing the work accountable, Kolba said.

“There’s guidelines in place for how to work with asbestos, everything from collecting the sample to how we’re supposed to dispose of it, and there’s people out there that will break the rules to save a buck,” he said.

An instance where people see that breaking the rules results in a serious penalty could put people on notice if they’re thinking about breaking the rules, Kolba said.

“I think the province needs to be a little more aggressive with the people breaking the rules,” he said. “There’s a lot of people breaking the rules.”

Asbestos products are banned in Canada, but asbestos-containing materials were still common in building products used for homes built before 1990, SafeWorkMB says in its asbestos information guide for homeowners. 

“As such, Manitoba’s laws assume suspect materials as containing asbestos unless proven otherwise, and measures must be implemented to prevent exposures,” a provincial spokesperson said in an email to CBC News. 

Although a person doing asbestos sampling must be “competent,” the “workplace safety and health regulation does not explicitly require someone doing asbestos work to be certified or licensed,” the province said.

“Among other proposals, mandating certification for abatement work has been included as part of the legislated, five-year review of the Workplace Safety and Health Act, which is currently underway in consultation with a stakeholder review committee,” the provincial spokesperson said.

The review is nearing completion and recommendations for changes to the act are expected in early 2025, said a spokesperson for Labour and Immigration Minister Malaya Marcelino, who is responsible for the Workers Compensation Board. 

“The Manitoba government will be prepared to act on the review committee’s recommendations that strengthen protections and the health and safety of all workers across the province,” ministerial spokesperson Ryan Jamula said in an email.

Under the licensing system in B.C. that took effect Jan. 1, there are 552 companies licensed for asbestos work and 5,937 workers certified as of Sept. 20, WorkSafeBC says.

Enforcement activity has resulted in four company licences being suspended and another four cancelled.