MONTREAL - It seems not even the traditionally snowbound Russians care as much about winter as the Montreal media.

Ditto for Toronto, where the army was once called in to clear city streets.

A recent study indicates Montrealers have been hit by local media with a blizzard of stories about snow. Impending snow. Snow removal. People fed up with snow.

"It's not a language thing,'' said Eric Leveille, general manager of Influence Communication, a media-monitoring firm which did the snow-coverage study for Montreal La Presse.

"It's really a fixation I think we have with the problems that we're having removing the snow. It's not perfect in Toronto. They have issues down there too but the newspapers don't seem to give as much space to that issue as we do.''

Montreal tut-tutted when Toronto clamoured for troops to clear their streets of snow in 1999. S'no big deal, they harumphed. After all, Quebec's biggest city had just weathered the 1998 ice storm.

Ten years later, Montreal newshounds are beating their colleagues in Toronto and elsewhere when it comes to covering snow removal.

"For every article that's written in English Canada, there's 30 articles written in Quebec,'' Leveille said. "That's way, way out of proportion.''

He says he doesn't know why.

"I think complaining about city services is more in fashion here than it is elsewhere.''

He noted some Montreal papers published what appeared to be entire sections on snow removal at some points. (The firm looked at coverage for a four-week period beginning Jan. 1. Not included are stories this week on the deaths of three women who were killed when a snow-laden roof collapsed northwest of Montreal).

Leveille said hockey was the only other topic that got more attention in Montreal newspapers during the period that was surveyed.

Quebec City came in second in snow-removal coverage. Ottawa, which is having one of its snowiest winters on record, was third.

Leveille said the firm considered including Boston, Chicago and Detroit but snow removal was not even on the journalistic radar in those cities.

"We even looked at cities in Russia, Germany, northern Europe -- nothing.''

But David Phillips, Environment Canada's senior climatologist, says interest in the weather -- especially among Montrealers -- shouldn't be underestimated.

"Weather's always the No. 1 topic of conversation, whether it be in the Tim Hortons or the Canadian Tire stores, wherever across the country it is,'' he said.

"Journalists are only responding to what their readers want to hear,'' he added. "Canadians don't want to read about scandals in Ottawa. It's about the weather because that matters to them.

"You don't need to be a PhD from MIT to understand the weather, you just have to have lived it,'' Phillips said. "Weather affects us. There's no immunity to it.''

Doing lots of weather stories about Montreal's winter makes sense to him.

Montreal is close to burying a snowfall record set in 1971, he points out. That year, skiers and snowmobilers were seen negotiating city streets. Plus, this year's snow season began early, in November. Removal has been slow thanks to stretched budgets.

Even Mother Nature hasn't been much help getting the snow to melt.

"It's been hanging around a lot, it's been accumulating and it really hasn't disappeared as much as you'd expect for this time of the year.''

He said he did a couple of calculations on the volume of Montreal's 353 centimetres -- so far -- of snow.

"If you melted all of the snow and weighed it, it would be about 1.5 billion tons,'' he said. "That's a huge amount.'' It could fill the Rogers Centre in Toronto to the brim 900 times.

Phillips says all that snow probably drives people to complain and write letters to the editor. Tolerance has disappeared with the recent mild winters.

"More people complain about the weather now than there used to be,'' he said. "People in the '50s and '60s and '70s, it was this, `Suck it up, it's winter.' ''