Lies, forgery and one Nova Scotia contractor's incredible web of deception
CBC
In the evenings, at seven months pregnant, Brooke Crawford would steal herself away from the mouse-infested trailer where she and her family had been living for more than year, crossing her yard to lay vinyl flooring on her hands and knees.
As their first child slept, she helped her husband, Phil, in the piece-by-piece construction of their new home in the rural community of Clarendon Station, about an hour's drive north of Kingston, Ont.
They had little other choice.
The nightmare of their first house burning down in July 2019 — Crawford waking to a blaring alarm and fleeing smoke with her baby in her arms — had been bad enough.
But it was when a smooth-talking Nova Scotia contractor named Shane Ross entered their lives soon after, the unimaginable financial and legal horror show began. Instead of rebuilding their home, he walked away with nearly $140,000 of the family's insurance money, leaving a trail of deception so brazen a judge would later call it "almost unbelievable."
"He intentionally hurt my family," Crawford said in an interview. "We're still trying to get out of the hole with the havoc that he's caused in our lives, and we just don't want that for anybody else."
Over the last five years, Ross has been charged with fraud, his companies have been fired from numerous construction jobs in Nova Scotia and Ontario, and he's been embroiled in legal actions with more than 30 contractors, property owners, towns and a Halifax university.
He has flagrantly disobeyed judicial orders and was even sent to jail for contempt of court. This week, he appeared in court on forgery charges related to a Halifax Regional Municipality tender.
Yet astonishingly to many who have crossed paths with him, Ross has managed to keep operating during much of this period, hired by unsuspecting builders as he remained beneath the public radar.
His latest company, one of numerous businesses he has created or controlled over the years, is even backed by one of the largest home warranty providers in the Atlantic region.
CBC has tried to catalogue the saga through more than 20 interviews with those who have dealt with Ross and a review of more than 1,000 pages of court, municipal, banking and business registry records.
As the lawsuits over unpaid bills and contract defaults piled up, Ross has boasted of his expensive watch, huge restaurant bills and taken vacations to Las Vegas and Scotland. He lives in a lakeside home in Lake Echo, N.S., and owns an Aston Martin luxury sports car.
Some who have encountered him speculate he has managed to survive by exploiting acute labour shortages in the construction industry, with builders desperately searching for anyone to get their projects moving forward.
Others point to how expensive recourse through civil courts can be when things go wrong, and Ross's knowledge of the legal system. They note his singular ability to talk his way out of tricky situations, a disarmingly gentle demeanour that can flip to aggressive when it suits his purpose.
More Alberta seniors are now eligible for a provincially funded RSV vaccine.
More than 100 workers at a steel plant in eastern Ontario are being laid off either temporarily or permanently, as a company with facilities in Quebec and Ontario cuts its workforce due to challenging market conditions — including U.S. tariffs.
A small town northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., has become the unlikely home for hundreds of foreign workers, but many may have to leave the community they've embraced after the end of a federal program put in place to fill gaps in Canada's labour market.
There's mixed reaction in Waterloo to an injuction allowing police to detain, arrest and charge anyone who is participating in unsanctioned street parties in that city this weekend.
Diabetes Canada is excited about Prince Edward Island's new pharmacare deal with the federal government, but hopes the province will reevaluate copays on diabetes supplies, says a senior manager with the organization.
After 26 years of accommodating guests from across the world, Faith Embleton says she and her husband Ken are ready to sell their bed and breakfast.
A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology's growing resurgence in popularity.
Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they've learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.
City staff would like Londoners to take a good look around their home and ask themselves a direct and possibly difficult question: Could everyone in your family survive at home, without leaving and with no other help, for a full 72 hours?
Liberal Leader Mark Carney will officially become Canada's next prime minister within a few hours, taking the reins as the country barrels toward a general election and continues to fend off verbal and economic attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Recent cyberattacks in Newfoundland and Labrador should have been a wake up call for the federal government about the reality of an increasingly hostile world, says one cybersecurity expert.
A recent CBC News analysis found that Nova Scotia is rapidly losing some of its most affordable apartments, but housing experts say there are ways to prevent that.
Premier Susan Holt is defending her decision to not use electricity exports to Maine as leverage against U.S. tariffs, arguing the move might cause long-term pain for New Brunswickers.