I’ve been talking to people (of a certain age) this past week about whether the amount of snow we have right now is comparatively normal when it comes to seasons’ past. As I remember it, the last few winters have been typified by a snow/melt cycle where we get a couple of inches of snow, it all melts and gets washed away, and then we start again.
According to an article in GuelphToday earlier this week, we have not had this much snow on the ground at this time of year since 2001, or nearly a quarter of a century. Perhaps that’s why our snow removal teams have been so slow to react.
At least it sure feels that way.
Normally I wouldn’t be one to give Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley credit for anything – if there was a way that he could pin stubbing his toe on a liberal/progressive politician like Olivia Chow, he would – but he is right about what the slow pace of snow removal after repeated blizzards says about our institutions at a most basic level:
“This wasn’t some once-in-a-century storm; we had a similar storm with much faster cleanup in 2022. We may not be Ottawa, Edmonton or Montreal, but Toronto is still a winter city and basic snow-clearing and removal has to be part of the core city services,” Lilley wrote.
I remember years ago working at Zellers and being told by management that one bad experience does more in the mind of a patron that 100 good experiences. The same can be said for journalism, one bad mistake can undo years or solid and substantive reporting no matter the size and scope of that misstep.
So what do you imagine goes though someone’s head when they’re walking down the sidewalk adjacent to a major street four nights after the last blizzard blew through town and it’s still impassable?
How about someone in a wheelchair? A person who wants to be let off at a bus stop near a busy plaza, but the stop hasn’t been shovelled out yet and the driver refuses to let you off down the street where the snow is clear because there’s technically no bus stop there? What if you get off the bus despite the danger and you get stuck in a snowbank for an hour after the bus drove away and the driver left you there saying that they’d send help?
That last one happened to a friend of mine, and it wasn’t for the last time this week.
With each passing snowfall, the slow to middling snow removal is having a compounding effect. If a sidewalk isn’t cleared after the first two blizzards, it’s probably not going to get cleared after the third, or the fourth. In the place of properly clear sidewalks and paths is a slim trail of tramped down snow that’s uneven and dangerous to walk on, especially when its next to a busy roadway in a city where cyclists and pedestrians have definitely died in traffic collisions these last several months.
And what is our mayor doing? He’s taking social media polls about some cool street plows with an appendage that will assure you will never have to dig out the end of your driveway again, and he’s proposing to find space in the city budget next year to make it happen.
Once again, laid bare before us is the fact that only car owners matter in Guelph, one of Canada’s most environmentally progressive cities. Allegedly.
I was tromping over one of those unplowed sidewalks Wednesday night when I came to a clearing. City crews had dug out the bus stop but none of the sidewalks leading to it. Whose bright idea was this? Is the theory that people are being dropped off and picked up at the bus stop and taken home, or is anybody thinking at all?
It’s hard to say, but let’s consider expectations. All last weekend, there were posts on the City of Guelph socials saying be patient, we will get to all the streets in turn. This is fair. In our “your way right away” society, where you can get almost anything delivered to your front door with a couple of clicks on a device, there’s a feeling that waiting is bad customer service.
I live on a side street, surround by arterial roads, so when I walked around the neighbourhood Monday morning and could literally see the comparison between plowed and unplowed at the first cross street, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, by the time I got home that evening after spending Family Day with, you know, family, my street was plowed, which actually kind of impressed me.
Patience is a virtue, but it also has limits. On Wednesday and Thursday (when a fresh layer of snow fell by the way) so many sidewalks were still nearly impassable, even if you were able-bodied, and I mean major areas like the intersection of Clair and Gosling Gardens where there are two different bus stops. Again, the stops were shovelled out, but the sidewalks leading to them were not.
When it’s days after a snowstorm and so many sidewalks are still treacherous you can’t keep calling for patience. That’s a failure of meeting the minimum expectations of your customers, and it’s the type of governance that turns people against their government because if a Canadian city can’t properly dig out roads and sidewalks and trails days after a snowstorm, can they actually do anything right? How are they supposed to handle something that’s truly out of the ordinary?
I have no doubt that City of Guelph work crews are trying to their best, but there’s a town full of people doing their best to try and get places days after snow events and can’t even make it down the street. How much longer do people wait? Are there any hard deadlines? Are there any human or other resources needed that can get this work done faster? Or are we just so out of practice with this kind of snow that an F-grade to the response was inevitable?
I’m not sure, but if you’ll excuse me, I know have to begin my assent to get to the top of this snowbank. I need to get to work sometime in the next three hours…