Demolition looks like a quantities trade from a distance — walls, finishes and structures to remove, measured off the drawings and priced by the tonne or the square foot. On real Canadian ICI tenders it's a regulatory trade wearing a quantities trade's clothing. The designated-substances survey decides more of the actual cost than the demolition plans do, because it's the document that tells you what operation class you're running under, what protective measures that class demands, and what happens when the survey's assumptions turn out to be wrong once the walls actually come open.
This is a working list of where demolition and abatement scope actually gets decided, built from what shows up across real Canadian ICI tenders — renovations, additions and full-building projects with occupied adjacencies. Not a regulatory summary. A list of the specific documents and clauses worth chasing down before the number leaves the office.
What's reliably yours
- Building demolition — structures identified for demolition, complete to whatever limit the documents state: slab, foundations, below-grade services. That limit is worth extracting explicitly, since "demolish the building" and "demolish the building including its foundations" are different scopes at a very different price.
- Selective and interior demolition — the drawn removals: walls, finishes, equipment, and openings cut into existing construction, per the demolition plans and their keynotes. This is the part of the bid that reads cleanest off the drawings and the part most likely to have a genuine keynote conflict buried somewhere in a large set.
- Designated-substance abatement — asbestos, lead, mould and other designated substances per the DSS report, priced by type, condition, location and the operation class the applicable regulation assigns to each. This is the highest-stakes line in the entire bid, and it's covered in full below.
- Disposal, manifests and documentation — waste classification, transport manifests, receiving-facility records and clearance documentation. Treat this as real administrative labour with a real cost, not paperwork that happens for free alongside the truck.
- Dust, noise and containment control — enclosures, negative air, decontamination facilities and monitoring, sized to the operation class the work falls under. The containment requirement scales directly with the substance and the class; a Type 3 asbestos operation and a Type 1 operation are not the same containment bid even on the same floor area.
Where the fight actually happens
Engineered shoring and sequencing
Selective structural removals — cutting a new opening in a load-bearing wall, removing a portion of a floor slab — often need temporary shoring, and who engineers and supplies that shoring is inconsistently assigned. Sometimes it's delegated engineering under the demolition contract; sometimes it belongs to the structural trade or the general contractor. Extract the delegation exactly as stated, and treat a document that's silent on it as a finding to raise before pricing, not an invitation to assume either answer.
Concrete cutting and coring
Saw-cutting and coring for new mechanical, electrical or structural openings is a genuine floating item — sometimes carried by the demolition trade as a lump obligation, sometimes carried individually by each trade that needs an opening for its own work. A tender that's ambiguous here tends to produce the worst kind of gap: every trade assuming coring is someone else's line, discovered only when nobody shows up to cut the hole. Extract who carries it, and whether the assignment is uniform across the whole job or varies opening by opening.
Salvage and reuse
Fixtures, equipment or architectural elements the owner wants salvaged, protected and turned over add real handling cost and real liability that a straight demolition quantity doesn't capture — a salvaged item damaged in removal is a claim, not a rounding error. Extract the salvage list and the stated care standard specifically; a demolition bid priced as if everything goes straight to the bin is a different bid than one that has to protect and stage items for owner pickup.
The other half: what isn't yours, even when it looks close
- Utility disconnects by authorities — the physical disconnect performed by the utility itself follows the utility's process and timeline, not the demolition schedule. What's worth extracting is the arrangement and fee obligation as the documents actually state it, since scheduling around a utility's own timeline is a real project-schedule risk even though the work itself isn't yours.
- Contaminated soil remediation — where remediation is assigned to site work or a separate environmental contract, it stays there. The boundary worth confirming precisely is excavated soil versus built-material abatement; the two get lumped together casually in conversation far more often than the documents actually lump them together in scope.
- Capping and making safe by mechanical and electrical trades — services need to be capped and certified safe before demolition proceeds against them, and that capping belongs to the M&E trades, not demolition. Extract who performs it and confirm the certification actually happens before the schedule assumes demolition can start.
Five things that hide outside the demolition drawings entirely
- The DSS report, read in full. Quantities, material conditions, what's assumed versus confirmed, and — critically — the gap language describing what happens when a substance is found that the survey didn't anticipate. That last clause is often the single most consequential paragraph in the entire tender for this trade.
- Regulatory classes and notification periods. Operation classes such as O. Reg. 278/05 Type 1, 2 or 3, plus the notification lead times attached to each and who's responsible for filing, set both the protective-measures cost and the schedule float before work can even begin.
- Air monitoring and clearance. Who provides the monitoring consultant, what clearance criteria apply, and — the clause worth hunting for specifically — who pays when a clearance test fails and containment has to be re-cleaned and re-tested.
- Pre-condition surveys and vibration limits. Adjacent-property condition surveys, vibration monitoring, and crack thresholds are common on occupied or tightly-sited urban projects, and they add real monitoring cost that a demolition-only read of the drawings won't surface.
- Extent-of-demolition ambiguity. Every place a demolition hatch boundary, a keynote and the physical site reality disagree with each other is a dispute waiting to happen — and every "to remain" note next to a removal is worth extracting individually rather than trusted to be consistent across the set.
Who you're actually sharing the site with
| Trade | What to reconcile before you price |
|---|---|
| Site work | Grade restoration after demolition, backfill of removed basements, and haul routes shared across both scopes. |
| Mechanical & electrical | Service capping certification before demolition proceeds against those services — confirm it happens, not just that it's assigned. |
| General contractor | Phasing around occupied adjacencies, and who owns and maintains the hoarding between demolition and the work that follows it. |
| Environmental consultant | Monitoring schedule, clearance criteria, and how disputed report interpretations get resolved before they become schedule delays. |
The pass that catches most of this
Read the DSS report cover to cover before pricing a single removal off the demolition drawings — it sets the operation class, the containment cost and the gap language that decides who pays when the walls don't match the survey. Then walk the demolition plans specifically for "to remain" notes and unassigned saw-cutting, since those are the two places a boundary dispute is most likely to hide in plain sight. The demolition drawings tell you what to remove; the regulatory documents around them tell you what removing it is actually going to cost.