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// Last week I crossed Canada, from Vancouver to Toronto, and then onwards to Montreal, entirely by land. It was a 5,000-kilometer journey on two VIA Rail trains, the first being the storied, twice-weekly The Canadian. The second, Train 68, was a much more prosaic "Corridor" train, one of a half dozen scheduled between Toronto and Montreal that day. I'll be writing in much more detail about this journey—and, in this case, the word is apt—in this space at a later date. For now, I want to address something that has been front of mind for myself—and a lot of people in North America—and which I saw a lot of on The Canadian.
In a word: Winter.
I've been doing some hard thinking about the impact that winter weather has on the way we get around, especially on the sustainable modes of transportation (trains, transit, bicycles and other forms of active transport) that we need to be bolstering as we go forward in this century.
The rumours of the death of winter have been greatly exaggerated. The planet is indeed warming, and quickly, but, as climatologists have been trying to tell us for decades now, that doesn't necessarily mean that every winter will be milder. Depending on where you live, in fact, winters might get a lot colder. As people in Minneapolis, New York, Atlanta, and Miami can testify, that's definitely the case for the winter of 2025/26, which has brought freezing temperatures, and unusual amounts of ice and snow to even the sub-tropics. In Montreal, where I live, it started to snow in mid-November, and we've had long bouts of -20 C weather.
"Global warming" doesn't really capture what's going on; and "climate change," while accurate, is too neutral sounding. I think the Scottish environmental writer Robert Macfarlane is right to refer to what's going on around the world as climate breakdown. The weather patterns we've depended on since the beginning of the Holocene, providing the stability to nurture human civilizations, can no longer be relied upon.
Winters have been getting perceptibly milder in eastern Canada for the last couple of decades. January and February used to be reliably sub-zero months in Montreal. Lately, though, there have been wild swings to well above zero, often for days on end, in which all the snow and ice melt, followed by a return to deep-freeze. These kind of oscillations can play hell with your mood, and your health. It's easier to get sick when, from day to day, you don't know whether to dress for an Arctic freeze or a spring thaw.
Now, here's the problem: I think these somewhat milder, if less predictable, winters have lulled people in southern Canadian cities into thinking that harsh winter weather is on its way out—and that's had an impact on our long-term thinking about transportation.
Before boarding The Canadian, I spent the last two weeks of January in Vancouver. The Pacific Ocean is in its El Niño phase, which tends to mean drier, warmer winters on the coast of British Columbia. In my first week in Vancouver, there were highs of 10 degrees C, and the skies were clear—so much so that the northern lights could be seen from local beaches and hilltops. This was a sharp contrast to Quebec City, where I'd been earlier in the month, and where I'd donned my heaviest parka to brave temperatures in the -2o C range. I grew up in Vancouver, and, believe me, ten days of sunny conditions in January are incredibly unusual.
