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Vancouverites have been in a mad rush to get salt as the city experiences a rare extended period of snow and icy weather. At one fire hall, there was a miniature riot as a pile of free salt was snapped up by area residents in only five minutes.

Thus B.C. has joined Canada’s annual bacchanalia of salt. Literal mountains of the stuff are being dumped onto roads this winter, corroding cars, destroying shoes, withering crops and eating away at the very foundations of our towns and cities.

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Salting allows us to drive 110 km/h on the highway in the depths of winter, but it may well be the most destructive peacetime government program in Canada. Below, a summary of the price we pay for cheap de-icing.

It’s doing billions of dollars in damage to cars

In 2015, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration pegged salt corrosion as the culprit in thousands of vehicle brake failures. That same year, Transport Canada issued a recall of 3,000 BMWs and Minis that had been parked at the Port of Halifax during the 2015 ice storm. But it wasn’t the ice that caused the recall; salt de-icing had damaged the vehicles so badly that they couldn’t steer properly. Way back in 1975, Transport Canada estimated that de-icing salts were causing $200 in damage per car, per year — the equivalent of $854 in 2017. Corrosion-resistant coatings have improved in the interim, but even when one-quarter that amount is applied to the roughly 14 million registered vehicles in Ontario and Quebec, the result is an extra $3 billion in vehicle depreciation each year.