Can an asbestos job in Ottawa be split to lower its Type?

No. Ontario's O. Reg. 278/05 closes that door directly. Section 12(5) says work is classified according to the total area on which work is done consecutively in a room or enclosed area, even if the work is divided into smaller jobs. So a contractor who returns on separate days to remove friable material in the same room cannot count each visit separately: the areas add up.

What this means in practice is straightforward. If a contractor quotes to remove friable material from a ceiling in two or three sessions, each covering less than one square metre, the regulation treats the whole ceiling as a single job. The Type is set by the combined area, not by how the schedule is arranged. The same logic applies to non-friable material and to drywall with asbestos joint compound: the thresholds in the regulation are about the total area worked consecutively, not about visit count or invoice count.

The thresholds that matter are these. For friable material, removing one square metre or less is Type 2; removing more than one square metre is Type 3. For drywall with asbestos joint compound, removing less than one square metre is Type 1; removing one square metre or more is Type 2. Whether a material is friable is decided by the contractor on site, not from a description or a photo, and the Type the work falls into depends on that assessment combined with the total area.

Type 3 work carries obligations that Type 2 does not. Before starting a Type 3 operation, the employer or constructor must notify, orally and in writing, an inspector at the nearest Ministry of Labour office. Every worker must have completed the Asbestos Abatement Worker Training Program and every supervisor the Asbestos Abatement Supervisor Training Program, approved by the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development, before work begins. A clearance air test under section 18 of the regulation is required once the enclosure is dry. None of those requirements disappear because the job is broken into sessions.

A quote that proposes to split a job into smaller pieces to avoid a higher Type is not consistent with section 12(5). If you receive a quote structured that way, it is worth asking the contractor directly how they are applying the no-splitting rule to the total area in that room.

When you have two written quotes side by side, put the Type each contractor names for the job next to the total area they measured, and check that the two are consistent with each other and with the thresholds in the regulation.