Why Montreal’s snow-fighting army is the envy of other Canadian cities
Snow is blown into a hill at the Agrignon snow deposit site in Montreal on Feb. 21.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
First you hear the sirens, reminiscent of an air raid warning: dee-duh, dee-duh, dee-duh. Then an armada of trucks, awesome in scale and might. Private property is impounded; residents run scared.
It is not a military invasion – not exactly – but the routine process of snow removal, or déneigement, in Montreal. This unsnowing, to translate literally, is one of the most impressive such efforts in the world – even more so this week when Montreal was buried under the heaviest four-day snowfall on record.
The speed and scale of the operation is typically the envy of other Canadian cities and a quiet point of pride, if also exasperation, for one of the world’s snowiest metropolises.
In an average year, Montreal’s white berets – as the local writer and filmmaker Josh Freed calls them – clear 12-million cubic metres of powder from roughly 11,000 kilometres of roads, sidewalks and bike lanes. It’s enough snow to fill the Olympic Stadium 10 times over.
Sisyphus had his rock. Canadians have snowplows that create mountains at the end of the driveway
Snow plows clear snow from a street in Montreal on Feb. 19.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
The process requires 2,500 vehicles and 3,000 workers. About a decade ago, Mr. Freed made a documentary about living through winter around the world, travelling to Russia and Scandinavia to compare frozen lifestyles, and came away with a renewed sense of awe about his hometown.
“I think we have the mightiest snow-fighting army on Earth,” he said.
Certainly no other Canadian cities compare; Toronto was famously mocked when mayor Mel Lastman called in the actual army to deal with snowfall in 1999.
The city still lags behind its francophone counterpart in snow-busting prowess, budgeting three weeks to clear the current dump – 60 cm in Toronto compared to more than 70 in Montreal – while Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante apologetically explained it would take eight days to dig her city out.
Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante arrives for a press conference in a snowblower at the Agrignon snow deposit site in Montreal on Feb. 21.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Some Torontonians bristle at such plow-dragging. City Councillor Brad Bradford recently complained that Toronto is a “winter city” too and should be ready for epic snowstorms like the ones it saw last week.
But even Montrealers are starting to grow frustrated with the pace of snow-clearing, as Ms. Plante warned on Friday it could take another 10 days to finish the job. The mayor cheerfully described the process of clearing all of those sparkling roadblocks as being “like an orchestra.”
If that is true, the first note in the performance is loud and off-key. Before snow-loading operations begin on a given street, trucks drive through the neighbourhood with sirens wailing to warn motorists their cars will soon be towed. Montrealers live in terror of that sound, knowing it means they have missed (or ignored) the orange signs typically posted hours earlier to alert motorists of an impending operation.
“The way primordial man listened for the sound of the sabre-tooth tiger, our ear is tuned for the sound of snow-removal siren,” Mr. Freed said.
Next come the plows funnelling the snow from the road and sidewalk into a big pile before the snowblowers come through, often filling the 45-foot beds of their accompanying trucks in a minute flat, said city spokesperson Philippe Sabourin.
In a typical winter, Montreal requires 300,000 truckloads to dispose of all that snow. About 20 per cent is dumped into the sewer system. Some ends up at depots where the snow is piled 10 stories high.
A man walks down a street with his skis in Montreal on Feb. 19.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
These elaborate logistics cost Montreal $200-million a year, or about a million bucks per centimetre of snow. Despite occasional grumbles, locals and outsiders alike tend to applaud the orchestra at the end of the show. The city regularly receives delegations from as far away as Beijing to study its snow removal.
“They always come away impressed,” Mr. Sabourin said.
Montreal has not always mastered the art of déneigement, or even tried. At one time, mountains of white stuff were not something to conquer but a familiar presence to live with.
Horse-drawn carriages were equipped with skis to glide over the snow rather than obliterating a path through it. Snow days stretched into snow weeks. Until the late 19th-century, life simply slowed down from December to March, said Harold Bérubé, a history professor at the University of Sherbrooke.
“You accommodated yourself to the snow.”
Changing technology and expanding expectations of the state revolutionized the Canadian approach to winter. Trains were the first mode of transport to be equipped with plows, blasting their way through the frozen landscape in a spectacle that people gathered to watch. In cities, privately owned electric trams were soon plowing their own paths along major streets, too.
People shovel snow to dig out their cars in Montreal on Feb. 17.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
But until 1905, snow removal in Montreal was a private responsibility, with strict regulations about what areas citizens had to clear and when, Prof. Bérubé said. Even when the city took over those duties, the task remained largely manual, with jobless men lining up outside City Hall for coveted work on shovelling gangs.
It was, fittingly, a Montrealer who revolutionized snow-clearing. Arthur Sicard was the son of a dairy farmer who wanted an easier way of making milk deliveries and was inspired by the grain threshers he saw in neighbouring wheat fields. For 30 years Sicard worked on his déneigeuse until successfully building a model in 1925 and promptly selling it to the municipalities of Outremont and Montreal. The snowblower was born.
Even then, it took decades for the expansion of the state and the dominance of the automobile to firmly instill the idea that removing snow from the roads was a government responsibility in Quebec, Prof. Bérubé said.
And for decades after that, snow-clearing in Montreal remained plagued by bid-rigging and the influence of organized crime, the journalist Selena Ross revealed in a 2011 investigation for Maisonneuve magazine.
The process has been modernized in recent years, with the centralization of contracting (previously handled independently by Montreal’s 19 boroughs) and the introduction of the Info-Neige app, which tells you which streets have been cleared.
The city is even experimenting with getting rid of its famous warning sirens in select neighbourhoods this winter to see whether it really leads to more cars getting towed.
For all its growing sophistication, though, snow removal remains a stubbornly physical process. A 1956 NFB documentary, Déneigement, shows how little has really changed in the brute-force mechanics of displacing snow from a city’s streets.
When the snow chief of Sapporo, Japan, learned that Montreal didn’t have heated sidewalks during a conference on winter about a decade ago, recalled the filmmaker Mr. Freed, “he looked at us like we were absolute primitives.”