The next time Toronto gets hit by a major snowstorm, property owners might be forced to drag out their snow shovels and start scraping, heaving and hauling to ensure clear access to their buildings.
City councillors are debating whether to restore the decades‑old rule requiring homeowners, landlords, and commercial operators to clear the sidewalks in front of their buildings — a responsibility the city took over for downtown locations only two winters ago.
Several councillors have already floated motions to restore the former rule, arguing that the city’s current approach is too slow, too costly, and too inconsistent to handle major storms. That's put a spotlight on differences between how Canada's largest city, Toronto, and its second-biggest, Montreal to the north, handle snowfalls — and how they compare to northern U.S. municipalities.
The most recent debate follows a major snowfall in late January that paralyzed parts of Toronto, turning routine commutes into slow‑motion ordeals and burying entire corridors under rising banks. On Jan. 25, Toronto recorded its snowiest single day in the city's history, as Toronto Pearson International Airport got walloped with 46 centimetres or 18.1 inches. The previous single-day record of 36.8 centimetres had stood for 60 years.
This winter's record-breaking snowstorm was part of Toronto’s snowiest January since 1937, a month when sidewalks vanished, curb lanes shrank into icy trenches and loading bays disappeared behind walls of snow. The storm showed how quickly even the most valuable properties lose their usefulness once access is cut off and how firmly winter still dictates the limits of movement, commerce and daily life in Canada.
Shoshanna Saxe, a University of Toronto engineering professor, said the conversation about who is required to clear sidewalks and walkways has deep roots.
“Snow clearing is a shared responsibility between people, landlords and the city,” she said in an interview. Until very recently, downtown sidewalks were not cleared by the city at all. “For decades, if people wanted to get to their doors, they cleared it themselves."
Toronto is studying its procedures for handling future snowstorms. "The City of Toronto will be reviewing its winter maintenance operations, including sidewalk clearing, as part of an annual post-season evaluation," a city representative said in an email.
Debate over who shovels has begun
The city of Toronto's clearing downtown sidewalks in recent years followed decades during which property owners were required to remove snow by 9 a.m. the day after a snowfall. Saxe notes that "there have been motions (in the city council) to consider re‑establishing the old system.”
She also points out that Toronto’s mindset about cleaning up after storms differs from its neighbor to the north, Montreal.
“Montreal spends many tens of millions of dollars more on snow clearing than Toronto,” she said. “For Toronto to clear very quickly, we would have to choose that this is something we want to invest money and taxes in.”
With affordability dominating the political agenda in Toronto, she said, “The priority this year from the mayor is keeping taxes lower.”
Yet, Saxe said, the political pressure rarely lasts. “People get frustrated for a few days, and then the snow melts and the conversation disappears,” she said. “We tend to forget, which is why we do the same thing the next year.”
That cycle — outrage, melting, amnesia — is exactly what Toronto’s Auditor General's Office has warned against. The office has repeatedly concluded that the city lacks the capacity to remove snow once it is plowed, has inadequate storage sites and no reliable oversight of contractors. The January storm exposed those weaknesses in real time.
After that storm, office towers saw attendance fall. Hotels logged late arrivals and cancellations. Industrial operators in the Etobicoke and Scarborough areas of Toronto found their properties effectively sidelined as snow restricted maneuvering space and blocked access.
Montreal and Toronto take different approaches
The contrast between Canada’s two largest cities feeds a rivalry. Storms that would cripple Toronto are routinely absorbed by the colder, and winter‑hardened, Montreal that operates what analysts have called one of the most sophisticated snow‑removal systems in North America.
Montreal budgets close to $200 million a year for snow clearance, roughly double Toronto’s spending. It deploys more than 3,000 workers, hundreds of blowers, and convoys of trucks that haul snow to engineered depots across the island. Some of these sites accumulate snow so quickly and in such volume that the piles remain frozen well into the summer heat.
Montreal also uses a system of chutes and tunnels that funnel snow directly into waiting trucks, a design that could become more effective if future upgrades include heated entry points to melt snow instantly and prevent overloading.
Both Montreal and Toronto also operate extensive underground pedestrian networks that remain protected from winter. Toronto’s PATH and Montreal’s underground city link residential towers, offices, universities and transit lines, allowing thousands of people to move without stepping outside. But the underground networks only highlight the vulnerability of the surface, where commercial real estate still epends on streets, sidewalks and loading areas exposed to the weather.
Toronto’s unusually snowy winter wasn’t good for business, according to several retailers along Toronto’s King Street West strip. Two dry cleaning establishments said snow days resulted in little to no foot traffic, while an employee behind the counter of a popular 24-hour pizzeria said they bake fewer pizzas on such days. The pizzeria said this winter it has had fewer walk-in customers who buy pizza by the slice.
Every Toronto snowfall this year, including a single-day record in January, has kept patrons at home, according to Ori Grad, owner of CHI Real Estate, a hospitality-focused brokerage in Toronto. And, in tandem with tightened purse strings, the storms have hit Toronto’s bars and restaurants hard.
“The snow hasn’t helped, but it hasn’t had nearly as much impact as people not wanting to go out to spend money,” Grad told CoStar News. “We’re going through that adjustment of affordability right now, and the snow definitely doesn’t help.”
Even Vancouver, Canada’s third‑largest city and one that's usually sheltered from the worst of winter by its position near the Pacific Ocean, has shown how quickly things can break down when a major storm hits. A December 2022 snow and ice storm shut down the region’s transit system, stranded thousands at Vancouver International Airport, and left major corridors impassable for days.
US cities battle snow, too
In the United States, the largest cities spend heavily to keep their systems moving. Chicago budgets more than $100 million a year for snow removal and has over 300 plows, according to a report from the city. Yet lake‑effect snow bursts can bury parts of the Windy City under 12 to 18 inches, or 30 to 45 centimetres, in a matter of hours, as during the 2011 Groundhog Day blizzard that shut down Lake Shore Drive.
Boston, a city that typically receives more snow annually than Toronto, often spends more than $50 million a year clearing it, and saw its transit system buckle during 2015 when repeating blizzards dropped more than 100 inches, or 250 centimetres, in six weeks, according to news reports.
New York City, with more than 6,000 miles of streets to clear, can deploy over 2,000 plows at once and spends upward of $100 million in a typical winter, according to a city report. Yet nor’easters still overwhelm the system, as in 2010 when 20 inches, or 50 centimetres, of snow stranded buses, froze subway entrances and left entire districts inaccessible for days.
Minneapolis–St. Paul, one of the snowiest major metropolitan areas in the United States, budgets and plans aggressively, but even it has seen major shutdowns when Arctic outbreaks combine with heavy snow, including the 2010 storm that famously collapsed the Metrodome roof.
The American examples reinforce the same truth Canadians know well: Even the largest budgets and the most sophisticated systems can only chase winter, never outrun it.
Toronto’s January paralysis now looks less like an anomaly and more like a warning, some officials say. The city manager has acknowledged Toronto lacks the capacity to remove snow once it is plowed, and the auditor general has repeatedly warned that the city does not have an adequate number of snow‑storage sites or reliable contractor oversight.
Toronto’s January paralysis did not surprise Matti Siemiatycki, professor and director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto. He said the city’s struggles are rooted in long‑standing structural choices rather than any single storm.
“Toronto has a long history of problems with snow clearance,” he said, recalling that the city became the butt of jokes from its colder neighbors when it called in the military during the 1999 blizzard. “This is not new — it goes back decades.”
Removal rather than plowing
A major part of the problem, he said, is contractual. Under former Mayor John Tory, the city signed agreements focused on snow clearing, not snow removal — a distinction that becomes decisive during heavy events.
“In Montreal, the plow comes, but when the heavy snow hits it has to go somewhere. They have trucks that cart it away. We haven’t been doing that,” Siemiatycki said. Toronto scrambled this winter to secure emergency snow-removal trucks, which helped, but not enough to keep pace with the “wilder and heavier” snowfall the city now receives.
Equipment failures compounded the challenge. “Sidewalk plows in particular are not cut out for really deep snow,” he said.
Crews often performed well at the outset of storms, but removal lagged, especially on side streets. The consequences were immediate. “People with disabilities and strollers were negatively impacted. There are instances you cannot get down the streets," Siemiatycki said. "Major highways close because snow can’t be cleared.”
For the University of Toronto's Siemiatycki, the issue is ultimately about resources, risk tolerance, and political appetite. “The city is always trying to balance how much snow equipment and how many hours of contractors they want to pay in advance versus what they actually expect is going to happen,” he said. “Snow is unpredictable."
The January storm exposed the limits of that approach. “It felt like a choose‑your‑own‑adventure,” he said. “Everyone gets frustrated. It comes back to choices and how you spend money.”