[Inglewood Jack]

Originally Posted by lazypucker

Isn't the Nexen building supposedly full of asbestos?

https://www.bennettjones.com/Publica...il-Corporation

On March 14, 2025, the Court of King’s Bench released its judgment in CNOOC Petroleum North America ULC v 801 Seventh Inc. After discovering small concentrations of an asbestos-containing material from construction in the 1980s, CNOOC terminated its lease of the entire Nexen Tower, a major high rise office building in downtown Calgary, with twelve years remaining on its lease. CNOOC relocated its staff to another building and left all 37-floors of the Nexen Tower empty. The landlord, a syndicate of a major pension fund and five prominent Calgary families, sued.

The case was divided into liability and damages segments, and a sixty-day liability trial ensued. The Court found that the tenant’s breach was unlawful and unjustified, and that its purported safety concerns, if validly held at all, were a substantial overreaction to a non-existent threat. The Court found that the building was completely safe, and would remain so.

The case, which has been closely watched by commercial landlords in Alberta and the rest of Canada, will now move to the damages phase. Damages are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars of lost rent.