Ontario couple files $2.2M lawsuit over beach house being swallowed by Lake Huron

A couple in Ontario is suing over a beach house they say they've never been able to set foot in, alleging the vendor disclosed just three days before their deal closed that the building with "breathtaking million-dollar views" was unsafe for human habitation. 

The $2.2-million lawsuit was filed in a Toronto court in January by Michael Bousfield and Leah Stumpf, both from the Guelph area. The couple bought the four-season lakeside house perched atop the bluff, north of Bayfield in the municipality of Central Huron, for $330,000 on May 21, 2021.

"[It's] beautifully laid out, lots of windows, mainly western exposure, breathtaking million-dollar views — we've been told," Bousfield said in an interview with CBC News. 

The couple said they've never actually been able to get into the house. The statement of claim alleges that once they discovered the house was unsafe, they felt they couldn't back out of the deal — for risk of forfeiting their $5,000 deposit and face a possible lawsuit over the scuttled transaction. 

"We were devastated. We were in shock. We didn't expect an order to come at us like this, especially when we went in firm," Stumpf said. "If we backed out, we would have been sued, potentially." 

The couple is telling their story publicly for the first time —  to warn others of the potential risk in buying shoreline property in Great Lakes communities, where the forces of erosion, fluctuating water levels and battering storms have been accelerated by climate change. 

Bousfield and Stumpf said once they discovered the house was at risk, they looked at options to remediate  the collapsing bluff in order to save the house from being swallowed by the sparkling blue waters of Lake Huron. But what they found was a dizzying array of choices that ranged from $370,000 to well over $1 million.

The solutions included everything from building a retaining wall, to dumping enough dirt over the bluff to hold it up, even spraying the entire bluff with a substance called shotcrete (basically, sprayed concrete), which is typically used keep the sheer face of open pit mines from collapsing.

"There were lots of different options," Bousfield said. "What it comes down to is what we're allowed to do."

The Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority (ABCA), which is named as a defendant in the lawsuit along with the municipality of Central Huron, wouldn't issue the couple a permit to do anything without first getting a coastal engineering report on a retaining wall that came onto their newly acquired property from the adjacent lot to the south. 

The lawsuit alleges the beachfront wall, built by their neighbour to the south and given a permit by the ABCA, has made the erosion worse.

The lawsuit alleges both the municipality and the ABCA knew the wall was built "without environmental, geotechnical, structural and soil engineering studies and reports." 

Court filings by the plaintiffs also claim the vendors of the house, William and Luce Wachsman of Zorra Township, knew the house was unsafe as early as early as April 28, 2021 — nearly a month before their real estate deal with Bousfield and Stumpf was set to close. 

Since then, Bousfield and Stumpf said, the house has been a constant source of stress and a disappointment for their four children, who were looking forward to spending time at the beach.