It’s a troubling question that has been echoing through the condo towers in Canada’s largest cities for the past two weeks: Could the disaster in suburban Miami happen here?

The revelations about the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Fla. – deferred maintenance, construction flaws, salt-related erosion and potential foundation failings – seem to point to a uniquely toxic combination of causes.

There’s never been a similar tragedy in Canada, where provincial governments tend to be more rigorous with condo regulation.

“I’ve been doing [this] for 30 years and I’ve never seen something like this,” said condo lawyer Denise Lash.

Still, existing Canadian condo rules have significant gaps, which have been further exposed by the highly speculative nature of the market in cities such as Toronto and Vancouver.

“I think there’s a rude awakening coming,” said Martin Gravel, a civil engineer who is also the president of the condo board of a downtown Toronto building.

Condo owners, tenants and directors are wise to take a hard look at the structural integrity of their buildings and make sure that key repairs aren’t neglected.

The Canadian condo sector is better known for lesser incidents – high-rise windows and balconies that pop out or extensive water damage caused by shoddy construction.

In some cases, structural failings can be traced back to faulty construction and have led to legal action. In 2001, for example, the Ontario Superior Court awarded $1.6-million to an Ottawa condo board that sued then-Minto Construction and its contractors several times for work on an 11-storey building dating to 1972. The building experienced chronic water infiltration problems in the upper floors and consequently worrisome deterioration in the exterior brick cladding.

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