Salt sheds and maintenance yards help keep a community moving through winter. Another vital piece of municipal infrastructure is an affordable snow-and-ice control service. It keeps roads passable and safeguards public safety. In Canada, virtually every city and most large towns operate some form of winter road-clearing service. In most municipalities, fleets of plow trucks form the operational backbone of the system, scraping and salting the streets along fixed priority routes after each snowfall. Although plowing the main roads is essential, the crews cannot reach everywhere; consequently, homeowners themselves are expected to shovel the sidewalks and driveways in front of their own properties. These services are administered at either the provincial or municipal level. In Metro Vancouver, for instance, winter clearing is coordinated by the regional district, whereas other parts of British Columbia rely on their own local councils.

In densely populated urban districts, the sheer volume of snow that piles up makes simply pushing it aside impractical and unsafe. For this reason, most large cities run dedicated removal operations that deliberately haul the accumulated snow away from the streets and out to designated dumping grounds on the city's edge. These operations, usually organized around a schedule of priority streets, load the banked snow into trucks so that intersections and bus routes stay open through the worst of the season. City-wide removal programs can be found in major centres such as Montreal, Winnipeg, and Ottawa. Some ambitious operations, like Calgary's, even reach beyond the immediate city core to serve surrounding communities under a shared regional contract.