How a century-old Montreal invention changed snow removal in the city

The challenge facing Montreal snow-removal crews this week is without precedent: two big storms back to back have left more than 70 centimetres of snow to clear.

It's the most in a four-day period on record, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. A city official marvelled recently that the size of the snowbanks means the blower will need to pass two or even three times to fully clear one side of a street.

Still, the city crews are equipped with far more powerful machines than they had in the past.

Until the early 20th century, the city had to rely on horse-drawn plows, and often solely people and their shovels, to clear away the snow. In some cases, snow wasn't removed at all, as archival photos show. 

Smaller city streets and roads in rural areas were often closed to traffic through the winter months throughout the late 1920s and beyond, said Yves Laberge, a historian and sociologist who teaches at the University of Ottawa.

"It was a big issue back then, and it took days after a big snowstorm to return to a normal life," said Laberge, who has documented the history of snow removal in Quebec in the history journal Cap-aux-Diamants.

"In rural Quebec, there were places or villages that were very much isolated from the other ones."

From the middle of the 1800s to the turn of the century, residents in Montreal were responsible for clearing the sidewalk in front of their house — and often the road as well, according to the city.

That changed after the turn of the century, when the city took charge. In the early 1900s, labourers were hired to shovel snow for 25 cents an hour. It was taken away in horse-drawn carts.

The first snowblower to clear the streets was purchased by the City of Montreal nearly 100 years ago, in 1928.

The inventor, Arthur Sicard, was born in 1876 in Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice, which is now the Montreal borough of Saint-Léonard. At the time, it was mostly farmland, and Sicard was reportedly inspired by watching a grain thresher at work in a wheat field.

He wondered if a similar device could be used to clear snow, according to the entry on the snowblower in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

In 1925, he completed his first machine and called it "la déneigeuse et souffleuse à neige Sicard," which translates to "the Sicard snowplow and snowblower."

Attached to the front of a truck, the original design featured a scooper with an auger and a fan capable of blowing snow more than 25 metres.