Snow shovelling in Oshawa, and what a winter of it actually weighs

November is the month everybody worries about and it is the smallest month that matters, at about 188 kilograms on that driveway. January is the month almost nobody plans for and it is about 1,238 kilograms, a third of the whole winter in thirty one days. December and February sit close together in the nine hundreds.

There is a second pattern underneath the first one, and it is specific to this stretch of the lake shore. Oshawa's daily average temperature in January is minus five degrees and in February minus four. In December it is minus one, and in March it is just above zero. The American weather service publishes the relationship between temperature and snow ratio, and it is consistent: the closer the air column sits to zero, the lower the snow to water ratio and the denser each centimetre is. The fluffiest snow falls around minus nine or ten degrees.

Which means December and March, the two months whose averages sit nearest zero, deliver the heaviest snow per centimetre in the Oshawa year. Between them they carry 35.6 cm of the annual 101.7, a little over a third. January delivers more snow and lighter snow. December delivers less snow and heavier snow, and it arrives in the four weeks when most people are least interested in being outside with a shovel.

That is the honest reason the booking deadline sits at November 1 rather than in December. It is not a sales device. It is that December is the first month where the snow is both plentiful and heavy, and a route that is still being sequenced in the second week of December is a route that is late.

There is a version of this section written by somebody selling snow removal, and it says that shovelling causes heart attacks. That is not what the evidence establishes, and a page that overstates it is a page nobody should trust on anything else either.

Here is what was actually measured.

In 2017 the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a Quebec study by Auger, Potter and colleagues covering November to April across the years 1981 to 2014. It analyzed 128,073 hospital admissions for myocardial infarction and 68,155 deaths from one. One third of those heart attacks happened the day after a snowfall. Comparing a 20 cm snowfall against no snowfall at all, the odds of a man being admitted the next day rose by about 16 per cent and the odds of a man dying of one rose by about 34 per cent. In women there was no meaningful rise in either.

The authors wrote that they suspect shovelling is the mechanism linking the two, and that men are more likely than women to be the ones doing it after a heavy fall. They also wrote, in the same paper, that they had no information on who shovelled. The association is large and well measured. The cause is a stated suspicion by the people who did the work, and reporting it as anything firmer than that would be a misuse of their paper.

A second Canadian study, run at Kingston General Hospital and summarised in the same journal, reviewed 500 patients presenting with acute coronary syndromes across two consecutive winters. Thirty five of them, 7 per cent, had an event documented as following snow shovelling.

The physiology that makes this plausible is not in dispute. The commentary published alongside the Quebec paper describes shovelling as repetitive aerobic and resistance work that induces a Valsalva manoeuvre, loads the arm muscles rather than the legs, and therefore raises heart rate, blood pressure and the oxygen the heart muscle demands, all while cold air is constricting the vessels that supply it. The 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities scores hand shovelling at vigorous effort at 7.5 metabolic equivalents and a walk behind snow blower at 2.5. Anything above 6.0 is classed as vigorous. Shovelling is not light housework performed outdoors.

Now scale that honestly to this town. Oshawa averages 2.5 days a year with 10 cm or more of snowfall and a tenth of a day a year with 25 cm or more. The 20 cm comparison in the Quebec paper describes a day Oshawa sees rarely, not a Tuesday. The heaviest daily snowfall recorded at the Oshawa station in the 1991 to 2020 normals period was 29.0 cm, in December.

So the correct statement, which is less dramatic and more useful than the one you will read elsewhere, is this. On nineteen of a typical twenty seven snowfall days, shovelling in Oshawa is ordinary exercise. On the two or three heaviest days, it is vigorous exercise performed in the cold, often first thing in the morning, by somebody who has not done anything vigorous since the last storm, and that specific combination is the one the Canadian literature keeps finding at the scene.

Every item below comes from a Canadian federal agency or an Ontario municipal public safety page. None of it is our opinion, and we have left out the parts that sounded sensible but had nobody behind them.

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety guidance on shovelling snow is the best single page on this in the country, and its first instruction is the one that matters most.

• Push the snow rather than lift it. Lifting is where the heart rate and the blood pressure go, and most of a driveway can be pushed to its edge instead.
• Keep the shovel itself light, at about 1.5 kilograms, and keep the blade small, between 25 and 35 centimetres, if you are going to be lifting and throwing. A bigger blade does not save time. It just raises the mass of every load.
• Take small bites. Two or three centimetres of depth per scoop, not the full layer.
• Turn your feet toward where the snow is going. Do not throw over your shoulder and do not twist at the waist.
• Warm up first by walking or marching on the spot for a few minutes. The City of Toronto public safety page is the only Ontario government source that publishes an actual interval: shovel for five to seven minutes, then rest for two to three.
• Wait one to two hours after eating, and skip the coffee and the cigarette beforehand.
• Stop and call 911 for discomfort or heaviness in the chest, arms or neck, for unusual or prolonged shortness of breath, for feeling dizzy or faint, or for excessive sweating with nausea.

The CCOHS page also carries the arithmetic that makes the scale of this visible. A shovel loaded with 5 kilograms every five seconds moves over 70 kilograms in a minute, and 1,000 kilograms in fifteen minutes. Hold that against the figures above. The 370 kilograms of a fresh 10 cm fall is a little over five minutes of lifting at that pace. The compacted version of the same fall is twenty three.

Treat that rate as a floor rather than an estimate. It describes the lifting and nothing else, and a real driveway also involves walking the snow to the bank, stopping, and standing up straight. The gap between the two has never been measured on this property or on any other, and we are not going to invent a multiplier for it.

On your own property. That is the whole rule, and the reason it needs five paragraphs is that every municipality words the prohibition slightly differently and one of them prices it.

Oshawa section 6.1 stops any person putting snow off private property onto a sidewalk or onto a highway, and it stops piling or redistributing it there as well. Section 6.2 bars depositing snow on a boulevard that is not next to your own lot, which is the clause that catches throwing it across the property line in a townhouse block.

Whitby section 8.6 is the blunt one. Nobody may shovel, plow or blow snow, slush or ice onto a sidewalk, onto a pedestrian walkway or onto a highway, and nobody may send it across one either, authorization aside. Whitby is also the only municipality of the five that attaches a published administrative penalty to that specific act, escalating through three tiers for repeat notices, and the only one that makes the fire hydrant a legal duty rather than a request. Section 6.1 of that by-law requires snow and ice removed from within a 60 centimetre radius of any hydrant on a boulevard. Oshawa asks for about two feet around a hydrant and calls it a request.

Clarington By-law 93-144 section 8 is the strongest statutory wording in the region. No person shall sweep, shovel, throw, drop or place any snow, slush or ice onto the travelled portion of any highway or onto any sidewalk on any highway. It leaves very little room to argue about what counts.

Pickering adds the one instruction nobody else publishes, and it is the one that causes the most actual damage. Keep shovelled snow away from the storm sewer catch basin, particularly the one next to your own property. A blocked catch basin is how a thaw becomes street flooding and how a refreeze becomes a sheet of ice across the road in front of your house. Pickering also explains, on its own winter pages, why the second windrow arrives: plows push the ridge as tight to the curb as they can while maintaining at least a five metre road width, and anything that does not fit comes back across the driveway mouths.

None of the four by-laws we read contains a clause about depositing snow on a neighbour's property. Oshawa section 6.2 comes nearest, and it is about the boulevard rather than the lot. That gap is reported here because it is a gap, not because it is permission.

Four of them, and they are the reason this service exists.

The windrow is the first and the worst. When a municipal plow passes your street it leaves a ridge across the mouth of your driveway, and that ridge is not the snow that fell on your driveway. It is the snow from the road, pushed, compacted under a blade and left to set. It sits at the dense end of the range from the moment it lands. Oshawa will clear it for assistance program households, and only when it measures at least 20 centimetres high. Whitby clears it for its program households at 10 centimetres. For everybody else, in all five municipalities, it belongs to the property owner. The town by town detail is in the windrow clearing guide.

The second is the surface that has already been driven on. Two tire tracks compressed into a 10 centimetre layer and then frozen overnight do not shovel. They chip. A pusher rides straight over them and the only thing that lifts them is an edge and a lot of weight, which is also how driveways get gouged. What happens to the surface underneath is covered in what actually causes plow damage.

The third is the morning you have to be somewhere. Fifteen centimetres overnight on a 33 square metre driveway is about 555 kilograms at the fresh density, which is 111 loads. That is not a ten minute job in the dark before work, and a 7 AM target is not a marketing line when the alternative is leaving at seven thirty with your chest pounding.

The fourth is the one nobody plans for. Anybody can be the person who should not be out there, and it is rarely announced in advance. A new diagnosis, a parent who moved in, a winter spent on crutches. The right question is not whether you can clear your driveway this year. It is what happens to it in the February you cannot.

What that costs is published rather than quoted on the phone. The seasonal snow package covers the driveway, the walkway and salting, unlimited, at the measured 3 cm trigger with the 7 AM target after overnight snow. Three property sizes, three figures, and HST goes on all three.

Spread the middle figure across the 27 snowfall days on a standard driveway and it lands near $36 a day, or about 26 cents a kilogram. A good pusher costs roughly what one of those days costs. We would rather you did that arithmetic properly than took our word for it, which is why the inputs are all on this page. The month by month cost comparison, including the per visit and monthly models, is on what snow removal costs in Oshawa, and how the whole winter is priced is on the membership page.

One more thing the money does not buy, and it should. A plow clears the driveway. It does not clear the three steps to your front door, and almost every winter fall that matters happens on a step, a landing or the strip of concrete between the two. Whatever you decide about the driveway, do the walkway first, do it early, and put something down on it afterwards.

Andrew owns and runs Northline Property Care out of Oshawa. He has six winters of clearing snow in Durham Region behind him, which is his own experience and not the trading history of the company, because Northline registered in August 2026, so no winter has yet been worked under the business name. The distinction matters and this site keeps it.

This article was written because the question keeps arriving in the same shape. People do not ask whether they should hire somebody. They ask whether shovelling is bad for them, and then they go and look it up and find a page written by a company that wants the answer to be yes. So the numbers here are built from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Government of Ontario, the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the Durham Region Health Department, Health Canada and five municipal by-laws, and not one figure on this page comes from another property maintenance company.

If something here is wrong, say so. The phone number at the top of this page reaches the person who wrote it.