It's time for the city to clean up its snow removal policy, Mayor Denis Coderre said Wednesday.

Montreal’s comptroller general presented his report on Wednesday, detailing the perfect storm of reasons about why the snow and ice clearing was such a mess earlier this month.

The City of Montreal executive committee met Wednesday morning to discuss the findings.

Some issues in Comptroller General Alain Bond’s report are unsurprising, including extreme weather conditions in early January that dumped snow and then freezing rain on the city. The deep freeze transformed sidewalks into dangerous, icy paths for days.

Bond also pointed out that boroughs sometimes made the wrong decisions when choosing abrasives, such as using salt when gravel would have been more effective in colder temperatures.

The report brought up a few surprising problems. In the South-West borough, 50 per cent of blue-collar workers did not participate during the peak of the snow clearing operation, either because they refused to work or because they hit their maximum number of hours permitted by law in a 12-hour period.

“In certain boroughs, we have problems with the blue collars,” said Southwest Borough Mayor Benoit Dorais. “There are a lot of people that are not working when we ask them, so we have to check with the (union) so that's what we'll do.”

In Ile-Bizard, half of the machinery was broken and unusable.

At the meeting, Bond said he hopes the committee will pay attention to his most important recommendation: to establish a norm about how they handle Montreal's icy sidewalks and snow removal.

Once they establish standards on how and when they will spread abrasives, then all the rest of the ice removal plan will follow, such as deciding the number of employees needed in the operation.

Mayor Denis Coderre agreed and said the city needs a uniform policy in all 19 boroughs.

“There's a series of little things that should have been done and that they didn't do. The problem also is that we have 19 different policies to get rid of that snow,” said Coderre in a press conference at city hall Wednesday. “Priority number one is safety. We have to take care of sidewalks first, and not only in front of schools and hospitals.”

“We can all work together, create different kind of pools based on equipment and manpower to be able to act, react and prevent,” said Coderre.

The union representing blue collar workers agrees, saying snow removal operations were more efficient before the municipal mergers in 2002. 
“The service was better because it was uniform, standard service for all the boroughs in Montreal,” said Michel Parent, president of the workers’ union.

Guillaume Lavoie of Projet Montreal, however, argued that one policy across all 19 boroughs just isn't practical.

“We have to take into account the density is not the same, the number of cars parked on the streets is not the same, the total amount of kilometres of streets and sidewalks is not the same,” he said.  

The mayor said he plans to implement all 16 recommendations in the report.