Four days ago the temperature in Winnipeg fell to -31°C (with a mind-numbing -48°C wind chill), the city’s coldest day in 80 years and colder than surface temperatures at the North Pole and on Mars, according to the Manitoba Museum. The chill extended further east; parts of northern Quebec felt wind chills of -56°C, and dozens of cars crashed on the icy surface of Toronto’s QEW highway. Early in the New Year the Greater Toronto Area was still recovering from a pre-Christmas ice-storm (similar to the one descending on New York yesterday), which left 350,000 people without power and coated the city’s trees, roads and driveways with a skin of ice up to an inch thick.
Anyone reading about this while relaxing in warmth of the tropics must shake their head at the northern Stoics who can endure such trials with little more than a shrug. The author Margaret Atwood once suggested that the broad stereotype of Canada’s national character – its notorious reticence and unassuming tolerance – was the product of generations of immigrants coming to terms with unforgiving landscapes and harsh weather. (It has been said, with some justice, that Ontario has only two seasons: Winter and July.)
What the reports leave out, however, is how well places like Winnipeg, Quebec and Toronto still function during these frigid interludes. Yes, there are fallen trees, frozen roads and power outages, but these are removed, de-iced and restored, often within a day or two. During the coldest weather, shops remain open and buses, trains and streetcars keep running. Thousands of young children attend indoor soccer practices and little league hockey games; families swim at public pools, or escape on the country’s many highways for a day of skiing. The infrastructure that allows this to happen is so engrained in daily life that most metropolitan Canadians take it for granted.
Bad weather also brings out the best in some communities. During the power outages, many Ontarians decamped to the houses of friends or family members whose homes still had electricity. Others visited publicly funded shelters that offered food and warmth. Conditions were far from ideal, but they did not descend into the chaos that has occurred elsewhere. If one recalls the US government’s response to hurricane Katrina, or Caricom’s slow, inadequate gestures in the wake of the Port-au-Prince earthquake, the efficiency that prevails in places like Winnipeg and Toronto during these crises appears even more impressive.
It is humbling to compare the businesslike manner with these cities confront crises that would overwhelm us in Georgetown. We hesitate for months over the right way to repair City Hall, but in a few days they scrape and salt hundreds of miles of highways and repair fallen power lines in sub-zero weather. Even with all the graft that has come to light – at all levels of government – in places like Ontario, they can still deal with crises quickly and calmly. As we enter another year, one likely to present us with different but no less serious weather-related challenges, wouldn’t it be nice if our bureaucrats learned a few lessons from their northern counterparts?
