After Toronto’s snow-clearing fiasco last year, the mayor says this storm’s cleanup will be different

As Toronto digs out of a record-setting snow storm, the city is facing pressure to make sure there isn't a repeat of last year’s snow removal fiasco — which left many sidewalks impossible to navigate and residential roads uncleared for days.  

During an update Monday afternoon, Mayor Olivia Chow maintained that snow-clearing operations are already working better than last year. 

“Snow removal will be a lot faster — absolutely,” said Chow. 

City manager Paul Johnson echoed the mayor’s remarks, noting that cleanup would come in two phases: plowing and then actually removing the snow out of neighbourhoods. 

Sunday's storm saw as much as 60 centimetres of snow fall across the Greater Toronto Area, prompting flight cancellations, school snow days and TTC service disruptions.

Last February, the city came under fire after three major storms dumped 50 centimeters of snow, and initial cleanup efforts left it piled up with nowhere to go. The back-to-back snowfall overwhelmed snow storage centres, left sidewalks impassable and blocked road lanes.     

That’s because the city’s snow-clearing contracts – which were signed in 2021 under former mayor John Tory and don’t expire until 2029 – don’t include any provisions for snow removal. Contracted companies are only responsible for plowing city streets, so they have no obligation to actually take the snow, load it onto dump trucks and drive it out to a storage facility. 

But snow removal wasn’t the only problem last year.

The city’s 311 line also faced a temporary blackout on winter service requests, and there was an issue with its fleet of sidewalk plows, which frequently broke down, according to an inquiry into the February storms.  

A city report penned in November said Toronto would use its existing resources to bolster its snow removal capacity, including deploying its existing crews sooner for proactive snow removal, rather than waiting until snow piles became an issue.  In the end, the report did not recommend "engaging in specific snow removal models" that can come with annual costs of up to $130 million.

Chow says changes have been made since last year, including an end to the temporary blackout on 311 winter service requests during storms and better co-ordination among Toronto's agencies.

The city has also expanded how much snow can be stored once it’s trucked away and it’s added more melters at those facilities, said Johnson. The city has five snow storage facilities, according to its website. Its snow removal operations include the use of snow melters, snow blowers, front end-loaders and dump trucks.  

Before the weekend storm, crews had already trucked away snow from previous downfalls, easing the burden on this operation, officials said Monday. Snow was starting to be moved from transit stops and hospitals, with wider removal expected to start Wednesday. 

"The improvement we're seeing incrementally is, I think, what's different this year about the execution of the plan versus what we experienced in February," he said.