You guys in eastern Canada get hammered like that every year it seems. I used to fly out there often and it was always an adventure in the winter...ice runways, zero visibility...lots of fun. Out in the western side of the country we don't seem to get huge dumps of snow until early in the spring - march-april seems to be the worst. When I was a kid we used to have snow like you do - we could dig tunnels underneath it. These days not so much. It snows, then melts. Winter is more of a slushy mess. We did have a white Christmas for the first time in a long time though!