Insurance to confirm before a paving crew starts

The City of Toronto's own minimum for a repaving contractor's licence is $2,000,000 in commercial general liability. No record among the 376 in this index carries insurance status, so the buyer confirms cover with a phone call to one of the 358 phone numbers the index does contain.

The City of Toronto makes that number a condition of the Driveway Paving Contractor licence, along with identification, business registration and a criminal record and judicial matters check. The City charges $495.12 to obtain the licence plus $293.14 a year to renew. A contractor who holds the licence has provided evidence to the City of cover at that level at least once.

The accurate interpretation is that it is a floor, not a target. The City set the threshold for a category of work, not for a specific lot, and no part of the requirement changes with the size of the job. A crew resurfacing a small residential driveway and a crew rebuilding a plaza lot must meet the same licensing minimum. For any particular property, whether $2,000,000 is the right amount is a question for that property's own insurer, and this site has no data that bears on it.

Any business that repaves residential or commercial driveways and lots is covered by the City's description, including resurfacing and overlay work. Coating an existing surface is a separate activity, and the sealcoating cost guide records the practical effect: when a sealcoating contractor also offers repaving or overlay services, the licence question applies to that part of the work.

The index tracks how often that distinction actually comes into play. Of the 96 companies that carry sealcoating, 27 use it as their sole category, while 68 also carry at least one of asphalt paving, parking lot paving or asphalt repair. So roughly two in three sealcoating listings come from a business that also sells work the City licenses, and the licence question applies to part of what they sell, not all of it.

At this point, a single quote that combines several services is hard to verify. A bid for a sealcoat, some crack sealing, and a patch or two includes work both inside the licensed description and outside it. Zusashi Maintenance, which has served Mississauga and the GTA since 2007, prices those items separately, with $0.20 to $0.40 per square foot for its two-coat sealcoating and $1 to $3 per linear foot for hot rubberized crack sealing, showing that a bundled number covers several separate jobs.

None of the 376 records includes insurance status. They also omit licence status, years in business, revenue, employee count, warranty terms and any job-completion data. The index has not measured those items, and no company included in it was interviewed about them.

Directory listings lead people to assume more than they should, so the fact that no checking has been done must be stated outright. Any business shown here was located, assigned a category, and given whatever contact details could be found. No one on this side has examined, assessed, or approved it, and its inclusion in a list carries no judgement. Before a crew arrives, the contractor must answer in writing every question a buyer wants answered to confirm the business’s standing; anything involving the licence must also be checked against the City’s own records.

The contact fields determine the form of that check. Of the 376 records, 358 include phone numbers and 299 include websites. None include email addresses, so there is no address to send a written request to until a contractor provides one. A buyer working through a shortlist makes calls or completes website forms, and the paper trail begins after the first conversation rather than before it.

This affects the way the questions are asked in practice. Since an answer given over the phone cannot be checked afterward, the practical step is to use the call to request documents, not to treat it as the verification itself. Requesting that a certificate of insurance follow by email turns a verbal assurance into a record showing a name, a policy number, an insurer and a date. The licence works the same way: the City keeps the authoritative record, and a contractor's claim that they hold one is not that record.

How long that takes depends on density. The index lists 32 companies in Vaughan, 27 in Islington-City Centre West, 21 in Brampton and 20 in Mississauga, so a buyer in the northwest of the region has many companies to evaluate and can reject any contractor who refuses to provide paperwork. In areas with two or three records, applying the same standard costs more, but it remains the standard.

The call matters more here than on a directory of licensed trades for a second reason. Because categories on this site come from what each company advertises, a record that shows three services contains three claims. From the listing, no one can settle whether the company holds the licence covering the one the buyer wants, and the buyer who asks about it early is filtering on the one attribute the index does not carry.

For each of these, the answer is found in a document, which is all the test consists of. A contractor who can produce that document can answer in a day.

- Which insurer provides the commercial general liability policy, and what are the policy number and expiry date? - Is the legal entity named on the certificate the same one that appears on the quote and will appear on the contract? - Is the company currently licensed as a City of Toronto Driveway Paving Contractor, and under what business name? - Will a subcontractor handle any part of this job, and does that subcontractor have its own coverage? - In this quote, which portions call for repaving or resurfacing, and which call for coating or maintenance? - Is HST included in the quote, or is it charged separately?

Of all the questions on the list, that last one costs the least and gets skipped the most. The province's own HST page confirms Ontario's HST rate is 13%, and two bids written on opposite conventions are not comparable at all until their tax treatment is stated.

Published GTA paving rates point to the general range. Empire Paving, a commercial contractor serving Toronto and the GTA, lists $3.00 to $6.00 per square foot for standard commercial asphalt paving, and the parking lot paving cost guide treats that range as a reference for deciding whether a bid falls in the expected area. Overhead does appear in pricing, and licensing overhead is one part of it, but the relationship is too inconsistent for any bid to be read as evidence of licence status.

Ratings say just as little. For the 352 rated companies in the index, the mean is 4.46 and the median is 4.8, based on 12,300 reviews in total. A customer who posted one of those reviews saw a finished driveway. They did not see a certificate of insurance. Only someone whose job went badly enough that they were unlikely to be reviewing the contractor at all would ever have made a claim on that policy. The signal a rating carries and the signal a certificate carries do not overlap. That is why the coverage question survives every other check a buyer runs.