Jeff LeBlanc spent seven years quietly building what is now the Maritimes’ go-to radon firm before anyone in the trade paid much attention. Now, with a pending shift in the commercial standard, every general contractor and builder in Atlantic Canada has a liability question sitting under their slabs.
Somewhere under nearly every poured concrete foundation in New Brunswick, uranium is decaying. It has been decaying since before the house was built. The decay chain ends at radon — a colourless, odourless noble gas that seeps through cold joints, sump pits, and footing cracks, then keeps decaying inside the building into polonium and bismuth. Those are the particles that stick to lung tissue. The gas itself is mostly harmless in transit; what comes after is what causes cancer.
Jeff LeBlanc, president of Radon Repair in Riverview, New Brunswick, makes that distinction because it matters for the trade conversation. “radon's not the problem to be honest it's the polonium and bismuth the radon breaks down to”, he says. Once a contractor understands the mechanism — a building acting as a vacuum on the ground, pulling sub-slab air upward through the stack effect — rough-in pipes stop being a code checkbox and start being a design decision.
A Health Canada study of roughly 14,000 homes found that 24.8% of New Brunswick homes exceed the residential action level of 200 Bq/m³. That is the highest rate in Canada. LeBlanc, who holds a science degree from the University of New Brunswick, discovered this after attending a US home-inspection conference and noticing that every second booth was about radon — then coming home and Googling. He pivoted his home-inspection business, trained at a Regional Radon Training Center, and started Radon Repair. Seven years later, the company has grown from one to five certified technicians serving New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI. He also serves as VP of the Canadian Association of Radon Scientists and Technologists (CARST), which positions him close to the policy changes that will define the next decade of the trade.
The standard that will move — and the retrofit wave it creates
Canada’s residential radon action level dropped from 800 to 200 Bq/m³ roughly a decade ago, effectively quadrupling the number of homes considered non-compliant. The commercial OSHA standard has not followed — it is still at 800 Bq/m³. LeBlanc is direct about what happens when it does: “the commercial OSHA standard of 800… once it drops to 200 that would make a big difference”. Schools across New Brunswick and likely Nova Scotia have already been tested and repaired. Major banks have begun testing their real estate portfolios — working through a small percentage, repairing the high readings, then rolling out systematically. The pattern is clear: government-mandated compliance moves first, then institutional, then private commercial, in that order.
For a general contractor or building owner sitting on a commercial portfolio, the math is simple. The residential shift already happened and created a large remediation market. The commercial shift is coming. Operators who understand the work, the certification requirements, and how mitigation systems are designed will be positioned ahead of that wave; the ones who learn about it the week the standard changes will be scrambling.
What the building code requires — and why most rough-ins are installed wrong
New Brunswick adopted the 2010 National Building Code radon rough-in requirement in 2015. The code mandates a passive rough-in pipe under the slab, stubbed up inside the building’s conditioned envelope, ready to accept a fan. That is the legal minimum.
The problem is that rough-in pipes installed as a box-tick obligation often cannot do the job when an active fan is added. The reason is footing compartments. Under a concrete slab, footings divide the sub-slab gravel into sections, and those sections do not share airflow. LeBlanc puts it plainly: “footing compartments will stop airflow moving… I need sleeves the footings… get my pipes in there”. If the rough-in contractor does not sleeve through the footings during the pour, a single suction point cannot pull pressure across the whole slab. The homeowner pays for an active system that only treats part of the building.
This is a coordination problem that lives entirely in the construction phase, before the slab is poured. Addressing it after the concrete is down means coring, sleeving, and patching — cost that disappears entirely if the conversation happens two weeks earlier.
Why fan sizing is a safety issue, not just an engineering detail
Sub-slab depressurization works by creating negative pressure beneath the slab so radon is drawn up through the pipe and exhausted outside rather than entering the living space. The fan has to create enough suction to do the job. But over-sizing is a real hazard, not a conservative margin: a fan that is too powerful can depressurise the house enough to back-draft combustion appliances. “you can depressurize your home… cause back-drafting… combustion appliances… blow out pilot lights”, LeBlanc says.
The Canadian approach to this problem is to measure first. C-NRPP-certified mitigators are required to conduct diagnostic pressure differential measurements across the slab before specifying a fan — not after, not as a check, but as the basis for the design. LeBlanc notes that Canadian mitigation practice has historically been more rigorous on this point than US practice, which has often proceeded by drilling, installing, and hoping. The engineering discipline is why Canadian mitigation costs more than its US equivalent on a per-job basis; it is also why it is less likely to create a new hazard in the process of solving the original one.
The Atlantic Canadian climate adds one more technical constraint: pipes and fans installed outside the conditioned envelope will fail. At minus-30 degrees Celsius with the humidity those pipes carry, an exterior installation simply freezes. “at -30 it's just gonna freeze up right we got lots of humidity in those pipes”, LeBlanc says. This is not a detail that transfers from US installation guides, where exterior routing is common. Spec the fan inside the conditioned space.
The energy efficiency trap
Here is the tension that most builders have not yet absorbed: every improvement to a building’s thermal envelope that reduces air leakage also increases radon accumulation. Tighter buildings hold the gas. “when you increase the Energy Efficiency in a building you increase the radon” is LeBlanc’s formulation, and it lands hard against the provincial and national push toward high-performance envelope construction.
The implication for anyone building to energy-efficiency standards is that radon mitigation is not a competing cost to be deferred — it is part of the high-performance building package. An airtight house without a properly designed active mitigation system is, in some measurable percentage of cases, a tighter container for a carcinogen. The rough-in that the code requires is a start; the diagnostic and the active system are what the owner actually needs.
Where to find the work, and who is qualified to do it
LeBlanc’s call to action is consistent: test your home yourself, then use a C-NRPP-certified professional to fix it. The CARST directory at carst.ca is the authoritative list. On the commercial side, the entry point is understanding that government bodies move first — compliance mandates drive them before awareness drives private owners. Once government employees experience the testing and repair process, awareness spreads to private commercial through normal employee mobility and conversation.
Newfoundland has a gap: at the time of recording, there were no certified mitigators based in the province. LeBlanc’s crew serves the island when work is batched to make travel economics work. That gap is an opportunity for anyone in the province willing to get certified.
Radon Repair and MoeMar Homes
Radon Repair Inc. is the Maritimes’ C-NRPP-certified radon measurement and mitigation firm serving New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI from its Riverview base. The company handles the full scope: testing, system design, installation, and post-mitigation verification. For contractors specifying new builds, Radon Repair has worked directly with Moncton-area builders including MoeMar Homes — a family-run custom residential builder serving the Greater Moncton area — to install active mitigation systems in every new build from the ground up. That is the standard a liability-aware general contractor should be matching. Find a certified professional at carst.ca.
Guest: Jeff LeBlanc, President, Radon Repair. Episode 45 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. NB building-code adoption confirmed via Health Canada. Find a C-NRPP certified professional at CARST.