32 Replies to “It Snows in Winnipeg?”

    1. fight Climate Change instead? (Jim)

      Wait. Isn’t most parts of the East coast getting hammered? (USA)

      Darn you Canadian folks sending “climate Change” our direction. (-:

  3. They must be taking lessons from Edmonton. Snow removal has been a disaster for several years. Our twit of a mayor promises to fix the problem. (Uh-huh…..)

    1. Snow removal has become an issue everywhere. The growing belief is that the snow melts by April so why bother.

      Real estate taxes increase every year everywhere. The services decrease. On the bright side the number of bureaucrats increases and their offices and furniture get fancier. Oh also, there are more city funded programs for every variety of mongrel cause imaginable for equity reasons you know. But ice free sidewalks, bare and pothole free pavement roadways, garbage pickup or water or utilities, we’ll that is an evil expectation of privilege.

      1. I was reminded about that earlier this week.

        I went back to my house in B. C. and the sidewalks along the street are a disaster. The sidewalk along the street is covered with ice and it’s not worth me spending time trying to get rid of it.

        And then there was the back alley behind the house. Sheer ice. I could park my truck OK, but walking around it was a tricky business. The town stopped caring about maintaining it ever since it started picking up garbage along the street.

        This is the same town that threatened to tow my truck because I parked it in the back alley while I was back in Edmonton. The temporary permit on it would expire and that, by the town’s definition, was considered abandoned and, therefore, a bylaw violation.

        Some neighbourhood Karen complained about it and I had to do some fast talking with the bylaw office. I told the officer point-blank about the town’s hypocrisy. It claimed that the back alley was town property but it did SFA about properly maintaining it.

        Meanwhile, my property tax keeps going up and I get even fewer services in return.

    2. Here in Fort St John they stopped trucking snow from residential streets and instead dump it on the easements. OK, I guess, except they bury the utility boxes under several feet of snow. Our Hydro box including the 14 000 volt transformer was knocked off its moorings. Once the snow melted from the box a bit I called Hydro. To their credit a crew was here in 2 hours. Their biggest concern was whether the gap was big enough for young arms to reach inside (two exposed power bars at 1200 amps and 120 volts are inside) They told me how busy they are every spring with boxes knocked free or broken, leaking cooling oil requiring replacement.

      So, save money in one area (city snow removal) and spend more in another area (Hydro repairing or replacing transformer boxes with oil cleanups.)

      No matter, we pay either way.

      1. It’s long been FSJ’s habit to plough the streets and then use a snowblower to put it onto everybody’s front yard. Yeah, real fun when you have to clear that in order to get out to the street.

        There was so much ice in my back alley that if I didn’t have 4WD in my truck, I wouldn’t have been able to get in or out. Then again, the condition of the streets pretty much makes having that capability a necessity.

        So, since you’re in FSJ, we might have a few stories to swap…..

  4. They’re so damn sure of climate warming that it doesn’t occur to these idiots that reality doesn’t concur with their conspiracy theories.

  5. I’m certain this announcement of funds being directed from one gov’t account to another for snow removal is regular…

    It actually sounds like it was written by the same people promising a thawed arctic ever year.

  6. To be fair there has been an unusually large amount of snowfall. I have had to take to tying my dog when she goes outside because she can walk right over the fence on the snowbanks without even jumping.

    I wonder if it’s going to flood this spring.

    1. “I wonder if it’s going to flood this spring.”

      Well, aren’t you just a ray of sunshine this morning!

    2. Actually, going up to my house in B. C. nearly a week ago, I encountered flooding a short distance out of Dawson Creek. There was so much run-off that it covered the highway at that point. That had disappeared by the time I made my return trip a few days later.

  7. Perhaps climate change is driving some part of their thinking, but going overbudget in snow clearing is a very old problem there.

    This is just a continuation of the city’s perpetual habit of underbudgeting for snow clearing, and then hoping for a light snowfall winter. They have done so for decades. Years ago, their response to a heavier than normal snow year was to let the residents suffer and leave the streets an impassible mess. Political backlash adjusted that response to what they now do, which is to spend to continue clearing snow, and find money somewhere to cover it.

  8. All my life the cities have done the same damn thing. They budget for snow removal and if the snow does not fall as heavy as is budgeted for they take the money back and use it else where, instead of keeping an interest bearing balance to put towards next years expenses. Just using any numbers here. If you budget for a million dollars and spend nine hundred thousand, the extra hundred thousand not spent, should be held over for the next year and you should still budget a million plus inflation costs for the next year. This is Canada and sooner or later you will need the money. Good budgeting can be difficult as every idiot ever elected to office thinks he/she can buy votes with the people’s money.

    1. If there happens to be something left over in the budget, it’s usually spent idiotically. If it isn’t spent, then there’ll be less allocated the following year. “Use it or lose it,” as the saying goes.

      It’s no different than in industry.

  10. A few early snowstorms seemed to catch them off guard. The roads weren’t taken care of especially the perimeter and further out. But since then it has improved greatly.

    There’s quite a bit of snow piles around the city needing removal. Mostly on boulevards. Not removing the buildup would make future road cleanings difficult. But it really isn’t unusual having one or two operations per year where they remove the built up snow.

    1. Sean Connery says:

      “Let It Snow, Trebek”

      I wonder how many people here will get that reference…;)

  12. The most impressive and effective urban snow removal operations I’ve ever seen is in Montreal.

    1. Can’t do anything about freezing rain…
      Calgary in ‘80’s was wait for chinook, sand and gravel below-15C, else good luck.
      Edmonton early ‘80’s plowed snow into middle of road, then blow into trucks..

      1. Edmonton early ‘80’s plowed snow into middle of road, then blow into trucks.

        I don’t think that happens in Edmonton any more. More precisely, I haven’t seen it for years.

        1. In Montreal, the streets are ploughed in real time, then they put up signs 24 or so hours beforehand, on one side of the street, then send out trucks blaring their horns about 2 hrs beforehand, then have a giant snow-thrower and a convoy of 18-wheelers remove the snow to a location just outside the city. I’ve seen the pile of snow last until early July.
          Then they’d do the same thing on the other side of the street.
          This was around 2000-2010.

          1. I think at one time, the snow used to be dumped on the ice of the North Saskatchewan River. I’m pretty sure that it isn’t done any more as some environmentalist probably started whining about all the de-icer and salt would kill all the fishies or something like that.

            Then again, one can tell when it’s springtime in Edmonton. The water tends to reek of chlorine for several days. I can smell it while I’m taking a shower.

          2. In Waterloo, they banned the use of salt on major roads and the expressway to prevent runoff into the Grand River (AKA the Grand Sewer). It was kind of ludicrous since the water was so hard in Waterloo that pretty much every house had a water softener using salt to soften the water which guess where it went.

  13. If everybody took electric public transit then we wouldn’t need to plow so many streets.

    Don’t kid yourself, that’s what the neo-Marxist councillors think. Not dealing with the fundamentals of running a municipality but instead forcing an agenda.

    1. Back in the last millennium in Montreal and I believe Toronto also, part on the streetcar car company’s operating charter was to plow/blow the streets on which the streetcars operated because they ran on the streets.

  14. Allow me a slightly off-topic comment. “Infrastructure”. The American public has been saddled with $Trillions in F Joe Bidinh’s “Infrastructure Bill”. Why? Where do our Federal and State gasoline taxes go? CA bridge tolls just increased to $7 min. per crossing! Where do those funds go? Does ANY of it go into a “lockbox” for road and bridge maintenance and replacement? Short answer: almost NONE of our taxes and bridge fares go to this purpose. Instead, we are paying DOUBLE and TRIPLE if not more for every mile of road maintenance and foot of bridge repair. The government is spending our maintenance dollars on everything BUT maintenance. They spend it on bloated, useless, bureaucracy. They spend it on “mass transit” … they spend it on “global warming readiness”.

    So yeah … snow removal is inadequately funded, err inadequately planned with adequate funds … so the government begs “poverty”.

    1. Again, when I lived in Montreal, I used to commute to work on the subway. Once, they put up posters bragging about 2 million rides/day on the subway. I did the math, that amounted to almost twice what the annual budget for the subway and city buses combined, and not including advertising revenue in the subway and in and on buses. The posters lasted 3 days before they were removed.
      When they say “mass transit is a money pit”, they are lying through their teeth.
      Kleptocrats everywhere.

  15. That climate change garbage is for political purposes only. I can’t believe our city councillors in Winnipeg actually think it’s real.

    1. Come to Edmonton. Our silly council does and tries to make sure that the rest of us do as well.

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