In Canada, your recourse is to sue the insurer, but you must do so very quickly so your time limit does not run out. Your first step is to hire a lawyer to give you a quick legal opinion. Put him or her on a budget of about $1,000. The lawyer will then review the facts and law and let you know about your options as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your case.

Of major importance is the amount of money at issue. If you can take care of things for under $8,000 of your own money, my guess (not legal advice) from what I read here is that it would be better to do that than pay a lawyer to run it through court, costing you a lot of money, taking a lot of time and stress, and maybe not getting you anything in the end. Remember, they built the Court of Appeals to sort out errors at trial, so you could do everything right and still lose at trial.

One last option is that, if you think the problems stem from the negligence of the people who worked on your plumbing system or who supplied materials that are defective, you can sue them. You will, of course, need an expert's opinion. This is what the insurer would do if it paid (called a subrogated claim). When you go to the lawyer, be sure to ask about the advisability of this kind of a claim.
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