A person walks a dog across a street during a snowstorm in Montreal on Feb. 16.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
A second winter storm in less than a week blanketed much of Quebec and Ontario on the weekend, exhausting overworked city clearing crews, prompting flight cancellations and stranding passengers, many of whom were travelling to places specifically to escape the cold.
By Sunday afternoon, hundreds of flights had been cancelled at Toronto’s two airports and those in Montreal and Ottawa as a result of the weekend storm. Environment Canada had issued a winter storm warning across southern Ontario and Quebec on Saturday.
On Sunday at Toronto Pearson International Airport, as a blizzard battered the city outside, many travellers were grim but calm. Most of those gathered at the departure gates had heeded weather warnings and arrived well ahead of their scheduled departures. But not everyone was living with hope.
Tom James and Dorothy Santos were among those weighing their options after a cancelled flight caused them to miss the departure of their cruise ship in Miami. Despite their best efforts to avoid the weather-related stress, they were left scrambling, looking for any flight that would take them somewhere warm.
Their original flight had been scheduled to leave at 9:40 a.m. on Sunday. In anticipation of the weather, Ms. Santos said they came to the airport at 6 a.m. on Saturday to try and get on an earlier flight. When that didn’t work out, she said they went home and returned on Sunday at 4 a.m. to try their luck with the original flight.
They made it all the way to their gate before the chaos they were anticipating struck, said Mr. James. Over the intercom, the Porter employee manning the check-in desk for their flight told them it had been cancelled and rescheduled for Tuesday – about halfway through the cruise they were supposed to be on.
“Everything seemed good right up until it was boarding time and they made an announcement, and the girl making the announcement started crying because everybody came up to yell at her,” he said.
Without travel insurance, Mr. James said the missed cruise would cost them $3,500. Luckily, he said the travel benefits credit card company that they booked through is willing to refund them $2,500.
People walk down a snow-covered street during a snowstorm in Toronto on Feb. 15.Arlyn McAdorey/Reuters
Jennifer Slay was another affected traveller at Pearson Airport on Sunday afternoon. Originally scheduled to depart for North Carolina at 2 p.m., the social worker on her way to a conference said she received an e-mail Saturday night saying her flight was cancelled. However, she had been rebooked on another flight for around 7 p.m. the same day.
Focused on her laptop and with a book propped open on her suitcase, Ms. Slay made the best of a bad situation.
“The airline, in all honesty, they can’t help the weather. I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
Toronto Pearson posted on X that the airport had accumulated more than 12 centimetres of snow as of 8 a.m. on Sunday and was expecting another 15 cm by the end of the day.
In Quebec, snow began falling Saturday evening and started to intensify early Sunday.
Environment Canada said conditions were expected to rapidly deteriorate, adding that accumulating snow and blowing snow could make travel in some areas hazardous.
Maja Vodanovic, mayor of Lachine, Que., and a member of the City of Montreal’s executive committee charged with snow removal, said that by Sunday the city already had 80 centimetres of snow so far in February – nearly double the more typical 42 cm a month.
The concentrated precipitation, she said, “is a new phenomenon in climate change.”
She said the past five years have seen a shift in weather patterns in the region whereby January and February saw a much greater, concentrated share of the precipitation that usually falls on a more gradual level from November through March.
“There’s practically no rest for our teams,” she said, although under provincial law workers are obliged to have a 24-hour break, which prompted a negative reaction from some citizens on Saturday.
Some snow removal operators are also contending with another challenge: a road salt shortage.
Joe Salemi, executive director with Landscape Ontario, which represents 3,000 out of an estimated 8,000 snow-removal contractors in the province, said operators, who typically order their salt months in advance have had a number of smaller snow events earlier this winter prompting non-municipal operators to salt repeatedly to prevent slips and falls.
“It’s probably something we’ll have to deal with in the next couple of weeks,” with contractors starting to ration their salt use, he said, noting the problem has popped up across the Eastern Seaboard, with similar shortages reported in western New York state communities near Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse.
With a report from The Canadian Press