I think what your missing here is that many other carriers were operating flights. Jet'sGO's total meltdown showed how fragile their system is and how little experience their customer service people and management have dealing with these situations.
I was working all that week, the 23 rd, 24th,25th and 26th. It was a shambles, their were no answers for people and no options as flts on all carriers were full. Making matters worse was the fact that while they were telling one set of pax at gate 37 they could not go to YYZ because of weather on gate 41 Westjet was pushing back and over the loudspeaker was Air Canada calling final boarding for a YYZ flt. There was outright lying.
I see first hand how uninformed a pax can be, how things beyond our control can cancel or delay a flt and a pax will flip out.
In this case the pax were right, there is also more to this story than we know. How can 23 flights be cancelled and all of it be due to crew rest and weather. There was a meltdown, and it costs them a lot of bad press and a lot of lost customers, until they can fly to their destination for $20, then they might forget.
Basically there is no excuse for what happend,I can't see any defence to this fact. They will learn from this and have measures in place.Snow and freezing rain will happen all winter, it's how you deal with your cancellations and delays, how your employees treat people and how seriously they take their jobs that will see an airline through this. It wasn't handled well and that's that.