When Jack Driscoll saw the video of the collapsed condo building in Surfside, Fla., his first thought was: “That’s horrendous.” 

Then he started wondering: Could that happen to his home?

Driscoll lives on the second floor of a 12-storey building on the Dartmouth side of Halifax Harbour. He can lean over his balcony railing and look straight down at the seawater lapping against the concrete foundation.

“You can’t help but have ‘What ifs,’ ” he said. “What if there’s a flood? What if there’s a crack in the concrete?”

In the 2016 census, more than 3.6 million Canadians reported living in