Snow crisis? It’s more like a snow fiasco
Storm is brewing over city’s mishandling of basic service
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante and Jean-François Parenteau, the executive committee member in charge of services to citizens, are blaming trouble with city snow-clearing operations this winter on extraordinary circumstances.
But the events of the last few days seem more like the result of extraordinary incompetence.
There has been more snow this winter, Parenteau claimed (incorrectly) on Wednesday. The snow dumps are almost full, he warned.
Climate change is resulting in more freezing rain, Plante noted (correctly).
We’re in the midst of a snow crisis, the mayor insisted. More like a snow fiasco. After a particularly miserable storm dumped snow and freezing rain on Montreal, shuttered schools and made getting around dangerous without crampons, the city did its usual plowing and spreading of abrasives. Cleaning up such a mess is a complicated task — of that there is no doubt.
But Parenteau’s decision not to clear snow over the weekend, relying instead on a day of thawing and the possibility of fresh snow, was the first misstep in a comedy of errors that is far from amusing. By Monday, Parenteau had offered a mea culpa and reversed his decision. He ordered a full snow-clearing operation to commence.
Meanwhile, he picked a fight with Luis Miranda, the borough mayor of Anjou for having already cleared the snow, ignoring a central city order to stand down. The central city is supposed to make the call on snowclearing operations to ensure equity between different parts of the city and maintain a uniform standard. You’d think the purpose of such a policy would be to elevate the level of service for all, not create a race to the bottom.
And as Miranda noted, if you’re going to raise taxes, you’d better make sure you’re taking care of basic services. But the real absurdity is that Anjou may now face financial penalties for Miranda doing what Parenteau now admits he should have done in the first place.
Even as the city-wide effort got underway, questions began to swirl about its utility. Or rather futility, depending on where you live.
I watched as a backhoe attacked ice the consistency of concrete on the curbs in my neighbourhood so the heavy machinery idling behind could chew it up, spit it in the back of trucks and cart it away. The noisy endeavour, which looked like it removed as much street as snow, made little to no difference for pedestrians; in Ville-Marie and parts of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, the sidewalks were mostly bare.
In others parts of Montreal, however, the exercise was desperately needed. Sidewalks were treacherous and people had been slipping and sliding or having to walk on the road. Urgences Santé has reported a spike in the number of calls due to falls.
Couldn’t the snow-clearing have been targeted to where it was most needed? Plante talked Wednesday about reducing disparities between boroughs. So tackling streets still covered in ice rather than raking ones where the pavement was showing seems like a place to start.
Plante and Parenteau deserve some credit for acknowledging that the city botched the latest snow-clearing job and offering some solutions to fix things. But it’s disconcerting nonetheless to hear the person in charge of this crucial service say he resorted to wishful thinking to inform his decision.
Of course, all Montrealers who haven’t flocked south hope for mild temperatures and a light dusting of fluffy white stuff after a particularly frigid and snowy January, but we know better than to count on it. Parenteau needs to face up to the sometimes grim reality that we live in Montreal and it’s the middle of winter.
But worse is his false assertion that we’ve already got more snow so far this winter than we did in all of the last. It’s easy enough to calculate that we got 141 centimetres of snow in December and January (plus the freezing rain). But between December 2016 and March 2017, we got about 220 centimetres. So it doesn’t seem like Montreal is really overwhelmed by snowfall as much as Parenteau is in over his head.
Now Montreal is going to buy a few more special “croque-glace” — special tractors that crunch up ice on sidewalks that have been piloted in Ville-Marie borough — to deal with more frequent freezing-rain storms. Smart. The city is going to ask the province if it can use the Blue Bonnets site as a temporary snow dump. And we’re going to have a snowclearing summit to discuss best practices. What we need is less talk and more plowing.
Montreal has existed for 375 years and counting. We can be reasonably sure it has snowed in each and every one of those years. So at this point, we should be experts when it comes to clearing roads and sidewalks. The only thing different about this winter is the people in charge at city hall.
Montreal is not in a snow crisis. But the Plante administration sure is.