Snow Removal in Old Toronto

The part that costs people is not the shovelling. It is what happens when an uncleared walkway or an icy step becomes somebody's injury. Ontario law puts real obligations on property owners and occupiers to keep their premises reasonably safe, and municipalities across the GTA add their own timelines for clearing public-facing sidewalks. A slip on a property that was not cleared is not a bad-luck story - it is a claim. The second problem is that the timing is never convenient. Storms arrive overnight and finish at four in the morning. What decides your day is whether someone got there before you needed to leave, and whoever you called after the snow stopped is already forty properties into a queue. Ice is the harder half. GTA winters cycle above and below freezing repeatedly, so snow melts through the afternoon, runs across a walkway, and freezes into a sheet by evening. That refreeze layer causes more injuries than the snowfall does, and clearing without de-icing leaves the more dangerous surface exposed. For a commercial property, all of this is compounded. An unopened lot at 8 a.m. is lost revenue, and an uncleared entrance is exposure you carry all season.