The season's first storm to hit Central Canada continued to move eastward Thursday night. It delayed flights, closed schools, and sidelined drivers across southern Ontario before heading towards Quebec and the rest of Eastern Canada.

Snow, freezing rain, and icy conditions caused hundreds of accidents during the morning commute alone. At one point on Thursday, a crash was being reported every 90 seconds.

"We're seeing all these entirely predictable and preventable crashes," said Sgt. Cam Woolley of the Ontario Provincial Police.

"It seems like a lot of drivers leave their winter skills in the closet somewhere with the winter coat they haven't found yet."

The storm is being blamed for at least two deaths on Ontario highways.

Parts of southern Quebec are under a snowfall warning as Montreal, the Laurentians, Quebec City, the Saguenay, and the Gaspé regions braced for between 15 and 30 centimetres of snow Thursday night.

"A few regions will see the snow changing (to) rain on the passage of the warm front associated with this system and an area of ice pellets mixed with freezing rain will persist over the region of Montréal today," Environment Canada's website said Thursday.

A number of flights departing the Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport have been delayed or cancelled. Some schools have closed for the day in Quebec City where the storm is hitting the province the hardest.

Montreal officials unleashed more than 1,000 snow-removal and sand trucks that are currently criss-crossing the city.

"It's a big system and the interesting thing is that it's the first one of the winter," David Phillips of Environment Canada told CTV.ca on Thursday.

"It's a learning curve for everybody and that's why we can act like veterans in three or four months but we're real rookies when it comes to the first bout of winter."

The low-pressure system over the Great Lakes area is expected to travel through New Brunswick Thursday night where it will bring freezing rain and snow to the province.

A wind warning has already been issued for Inverness County, N.S., and Wreckhouse, N.L.

"It's a system that is moving south of the lakes and will move in a northeast direction. A good swath of Eastern Canada is going to be affected by this," Phillips said.

This system, which originated south of the border, is different from late-winter storms because of the expected precipitation, Phillips said.

"It's not just a mid-January storm, which brings a dump of snow. There is almost a buffet of weather types from rain and heavy rain to drizzle to freezing rain to ice pellets to snow," he said.

"It's a smorgasbord of precipitation types. You take your pick and they're all occurring as a congealed mixture of the above, so it's a challenge to forecast."

Although Canada -- the world's second coldest country -- is still a month away from the first day of winter, the storm acts as an early reminder of the cold months ahead.

"This is just a little reminder of where we live and who we are and what to expect in the months to come," Phillips said.