Toronto’s snowplow procurement was a comedy of errors
A new report shows exactly how our snow clearing got this bad
City staff repeatedly fumbled the ball when choosing Toronto’s snowplowing companies, a new investigative report from KPMG has found.
Following a massive snowstorm in 2025—and much dissatisfaction over the city’s slow progress clearing it—city council retained KPMG to do a forensic audit of its snow removal contracts, which it signed in 2021 and are still in effect today.
While the report found no evidence of wrongdoing, it shows city staff had serious trouble finding contractors in the first place, and may have risked exposing themselves to fraud and misconduct along the way.
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In May 2021, when John Tory was mayor, the city was ready to choose its plowers for the next ten years and had come up with a new way to do it. It split the town into 11 zones and kicked off a complex request for proposals process, where interested companies would have to pass various tests to qualify.
This was supposed to allow for better service at a lower cost. But to the city’s dismay, those tests proved a tad too tough, and many of its historical plowing companies flunked out. In the end, no qualified bidders were found for six of the 11 areas.
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The city tried again that September, but it still didn’t work. Needing plows regardless, staff scrapped the competition and instead gave contracts directly to five companies covering all 11 areas. Far from saving the city money, the new deal cost roughly $56 million more than staff had estimated.
The new contractors didn’t do their jobs particularly well, either. The contracts included penalties for plowers who didn’t meet service standards, and after just the first winter, the companies had racked up $13 million in fines. Oddly, one city official successfully argued for the fines to be cut, giving the contractors a break.
KPMG found other irregularities as well. During the bidding stage, one company had offered the city $40,000 per year to park their equipment at a city depot. Without getting its own estimate of what that land was worth, the city agreed to that number and applied it to all the other companies as well, potentially missing out on a fair price.
The companies also stiffed the city on equipment by replacing gear with less valuable substitutes—swapping a large truck for a smaller one, for instance—while charging the same rates. In 2023, the city also let the companies subcontract up to half of their duties to other firms—some of whom, it turned out, they had personal relationships with. It’s unclear, says the report, just how much oversight the city had over these deals.
In their recommendations, KPMG advises the city to give the request for proposals plan another shot, but with better procedures this time. They also recommend avoiding concessions, like cutting penalties after the fact, since they allow companies to exploit insider information.
That would stick with the private approach, but other critics have called for the city to just bring snow clearing in-house by buying its own plows and doing the job itself. No subcontracting, no funny business, no forensic audits five years later. It would be expensive, but then again, so was this.
Or we could just dig ourselves out, as Mayor Olivia Chow will soon pay people to do. But even that has a cost. No matter what, snow costs dough.
Anthony Milton is a freelance journalist based in Toronto specializing in long-form magazine writing. He previously worked as an assistant editor at Toronto Life, where he launched the Front Row newsletter. He regularly contributes all sorts of stories to the magazine, including deep dives on sports, business and housing as well as short-form commentary on our ever-changing city, from its obsession with cherry blossoms to its maddening NIMBYism. His work has also appeared in Maclean’s, Ricochet, TVO, the Trillium and more.
