By Mark Buckshon<\/p>\n
Publisher, Ontario Construction Report<\/p>\n
Recently one of our clients advertising Certificates of Substantial Performance (CSP) in Ontario Construction News received a disturbing response from a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) project manager, who emailed the contractor:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe publication needs to be with the Daily Commercial News, this is the TDSB standard and the instruction that has been sent from our legal department.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n To say the least, I was shocked and somewhat dismayed by this communication. So I set out to determine if the TDSB legal department knew something that we didn\u2019t about compliance with the regulations and statutes under the Ontario Construction Act and the Legislation Act (2006).<\/p>\n I drafted a letter to TDSB senior counsel Leola M. Pon, and sent it to her as an email attachment as our administrator prepared to forward a copy by Canada Post.<\/p>\n That snail mail delivery proved unnecessary.<\/p>\n In my lifetime, I\u2019ve never had a lawyer respond so quickly and positively \u2013 let alone the senior counsel for a gigantic school district.<\/p>\n Pon replied within five minutes saying the TDSB lawyer responsible for construction documentation would communicate shortly.<\/p>\n And, within five minutes, I received a second email, from senior legal counsel\u00a0Krish Chakraborty:<\/p>\n Dear Mark,<\/em><\/p>\n I am legal counsel to this TDSB with respect to the above-referenced matter. I write in response to your letter to Ms. Pon dated September 21, 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n Please note that we do not have any \u201cpolicy\u201d that requires CSP\u2019s on TDSB projects to be published exclusively on Daily Commercial News. As per your letter, CSP\u2019s may be published in any Construction Trade Newspaper within the meaning of the Construction Act.<\/em><\/p>\n We apologize for any miscommunication that you may have received. I will update my construction group on the matter immediately to include Ontario Construction News on TDSB\u2019s list of compliant construction trade newspapers.<\/em><\/p>\n I trust this is satisfactory.<\/em><\/p>\n Krish Chakraborty<\/em> This refreshingly rapid response says something good about the TDSB\u2019s responsiveness. It also validates our work since May, 2019, in ensuring that OCN truly complies with the legal requirements for notice publication under the Ontario Construction Act, and that contractors can be assured that their notices meet the Act\u2019s legal requirements.<\/p>\n With this response, I quickly sent a note to the contractor that his CSP notice indeed meets TDSB\u2019s requirements and we could close the file.<\/p>\n Ontario Construction News has successfully pioneered compliance under the Construction Act\u2019s regulations that allow the construction trade newspaper to be published electronically. But we also appreciated that we needed to stay as close as possible to the provincial government\u2019s legal definition of a \u201cnewspaper\u201d as outlined in the Legislation Act (2006).<\/p>\n It turns out that after many decades of publishing in print, Daily Commercial News ended its paper issues a few months ago \u2013 and now publishes their daily issues in a format truly similar to ours.<\/p>\n We respect the competition and its undeniable compliance with the law. With a healthy dose of competitive spirit, we\u2019ve sought to speed up the publishing cycle so that Certificates of Publication can be issued within a day of the relevant form reaching us as an email attachment.\u00a0 And this is with an extra proofing verification step \u2013 that takes just a few minutes but catches many errors before publication.\u00a0 Our pricing is competitive, as well.<\/p>\n In the months ahead, watch for further improvements as we enhance our journalism and expand coverage of the industry news important for your business.<\/p>\n You can request publication of certificates by emailing \u00a0certificates@ontarioconstructionnews.com<\/a> <\/span><\/strong>or visiting https:\/\/ontarioconstructionnews.com\/forms<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Mark Buckshon Publisher, Ontario Construction Report Recently one of our clients advertising Certificates of Substantial Performance (CSP) in Ontario Construction News received a disturbing response from a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) project manager, who emailed the contractor: \u201cThe publication needs to be with the Daily Commercial News, this is the TDSB standard and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":10892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,125],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10879","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-featured","8":"category-resources-and-advice"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10879"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10893,"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10879\/revisions\/10893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ontarioconstructionreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nToronto District School Board, Senior\u00a0Legal Counsel, Legal Services<\/em><\/p>\n