Thousands still without power after Monday’s storm
This article was written by the Canadian Press and was published in the Toronto Star on December 31, 2025.
People in parts of Ontario and Quebec were dealing with more messy weather and in some cases blizzardlike conditions on Tuesday as storm fronts continue to hit the area.
Environment Canada warned of nearzero visibility at times in bursts of heavy snow as squalls blew through parts of northern Ontario and west of Toronto.
Large snowfall amounts were expected in a wide swath of southwestern Ontario through Wednesday afternoon that could exceed 50 centimetres by Thursday morning in parts of Huron County and other regions.
Several highways around Timmins, Ont., remained closed Tuesday morning after Monday’s heavy snowfall in the region and ongoing blowing snow advisories. The city also issued an extreme cold weather alert as wind chill temperatures are expected to drop to 28 C overnight.
A winter storm Monday brought freezing rain, blowing snow and strong winds across Eastern Canada that knocked out power to tens of thousands of people in Ontario.
According to Hydro One utility’s outage map, thousands in the province were still without electricity as of Tuesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Environment Canada says some areas northeast of Quebec City and into northern New Brunswick could see between 15 and 40 centimetres of snow along with high winds.
In Quebec’s far north, blizzard conditions were expected to persist at least until midday on Thursday.
Much of Canada has been blasted with a number of weather systems over the past week, ranging from blizzards and cold snaps to freezing rain.
The weather has caused flight delays and cancellations at airports in Montreal, Halifax and elsewhere during the holiday travel period.
This article was written by Mike Hager and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 31, 2025.
Atmospheric river washes out highway on the archipelago off B.C.’s north coast
Just an hour after Chris Ashurst finished a morning of frigid crosscountry skiing, an atmospheric river descended upon Haida Gwaii from the south, swinging the temperature 15 degrees “almost into T-shirt weather” and setting off a massive melt that nearly led to calamity on the craggy archipelago off B.C.’s north coast.
That was Sunday morning. By the evening, Mr. Ashurst, a volunteer emergency co-ordinator for the North Coast Regional District, was one of more than 2,000 residents stranded on the north half of the main island when the lone highway was washed out by a flood.
The provincial government and local First Nations leaders said Tuesday afternoon that the rains had let up enough for repairs to begin on the main coastal highway and a single lane reopened later in the evening.
The authorities had prepared to install a temporary bridge over the washed out portion, but water levels dropped enough Tuesday for them to begin to install a culvert.
However, for more than two days, the north end of the main island was cut off from the southern half, which is home to the ferry and airport that transport people, food and fuel from the mainland.
Mr. Ashurst and his partner had planned to catch a ferry Monday morning for a ski trip on the mainland. They set out in their pick-up truck at 5:30 a.m. to take a logging road that curled around the island to the ferry terminal in Skidegate, but a kilometre onto the path they stopped at a puddle nearly half a metre deep.
Then, a logger in a bigger truck backed up toward them and said the path ahead had fallen trees and water flowing across it at double that depth.
“He was like, ‘nobody’s going that way,’ so we went back,” Mr. Ashurst said.
No major injuries were reported during the flooding and aftermath, though the emergency room in the north side’s largest community of more than 2,000 people, Masset, has been shutting down periodically because of staffing shortages.
Still, two days of being severed from civilization tested residents on the north half of the island, with stores being emptied of dairy and other essentials and the region surviving on one functioning gas pump, Mr. Ashurst said.
“We get zero groceries up here without the road – it all comes on the ferry – so I’m not going to town. We’re going to eat the food in our pantry until this all passes,” Mr. Ashurst added. He has lived outside Masset for 22 years.
No properties have had to be evacuated, but roughly 10 families stranded from getting to their homes by the flooding are being given vouchers for food and, in some cases, accommodation, according the provincial Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Ministry.
On Dec. 27, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship issued a flood warning for Haida Gwaii and the region surrounding the north coast port city of Prince Rupert, with up to 15 centimetres of rain expected through Monday.
Billy Yovanovich, Chief Councillor of the Skidegate Band Council, said members in the southern part of the main island were also helping house their northern neighbours in need.
His elected council oversees the village of Skidegate in the south and another council oversees Masset in the north, both working within the governance structures of the wider Haida Nation.
“It is just such an extreme oneoff, both communities have been really helpful,” he said.
Mr. Yovanovich said his main concern with flooding is the ongoing erosion of Haida Gwaii’s shores, which his nation is trying to fight through various projects.
Yet, his biggest takeaway from the past few days is that everyone on the ground co-operated beautifully, a fact he says may surprise some convinced that reconciliation in B.C. with Indigenous people has gone awry after recent court rulings on competing property rights.
He noted that this fall the B.C. Supreme Court cemented the Haida Nation’s agreement with federal and provincial governments to take over Aboriginal title to all one million hectares of Haida Gwaii, once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands.
“We’re still able to coexist: Nothing’s going to change that way. We’ll still all work together during crises and during day-today living,” he said.
Paramedics report having to clear ice and snow to get some people safely loaded into ambulances
This article was written by Morgan Lowrie and was published in the Toronto Star on December 30, 2025.
A winter storm brought freezing rain, blowing snow and strong winds across Eastern Canada on Monday, leading to a surge in 911 calls in Montreal.
Montrealarea ambulance service Urgencessanté said that for a period on Monday morning it received some 100 calls per hour — many for people who had fallen and hurt themselves on icecoated sidewalks.
Spokesperson Valérie Guertin urged people to stay home if possible, and if they had to go outside, she advised them to wear crampons and adapt their driving to the weather.
“Ambulance requests (are) mostly for falls on the ice, traumatic injuries or people with injuries following a fall,” she said in a phone interview.
By afternoon, another spokesperson, Alexandre Sapone, said the call volume had dropped slightly to between 60 and 70 calls per hour, compared to between 40 and 50 in normal times.
Sapone said that in addition to a rise in 911 calls, crews were facing challenges around loading people safely onto ambulances — sometimes requiring paramedics to clear entrances of snow and ice and spread salt or other abrasives on the ground.
Much of southern and western Quebec were under weather alerts for prolonged periods of freezing rain with ice pellets.
And while most of those alerts had been lifted by late afternoon, some areas remained under wind warnings, including Montreal where gusts of up to 90 kilometres per hour were expected.
Vast swaths of the province were also under winter storm warnings, with regions such as Saguenay, Lac StJean and Lower St. Lawrence expecting some 20 to 30 centimetres of snow along with strong winds.
More than 12,000 HydroQuébec clients were without power as of 6 p.m., including some 9,700 homes and businesses in the Laurentians area north of Montreal.
Meteorologist Eric Tomlinson said the precipitation had largely shifted to regular rain by late morning in Montreal — leaving behind five to 10 millimetres of ice — but that freezing rain continued to fall north of the city. He warned that the temperature was expected to drop sharply during the night, which could once again turn surfaces slippery.
Freezing rain, blowing snow and strong winds were in the forecast for many parts of Eastern Canada, from Ontario to Newfoundland and Labrador.
Freezing rain warnings were issued in all four Atlantic provinces, including parts of Newfoundland and Labrador where between 50 to 100 cm of snow has fallen since Christmas Day. Newfoundland Power reported more than 2,500 customers without power Monday morning, mostly along the southwest coast of the Avalon Peninsula.
Environment Canada meteorologist Ian Hubbard said Atlantic Canada is in the path of the same system that brought freezing rain to the Great Lakes region and parts of Quebec, but the impacts won’t be as severe since some of the precipitation would likely fall as rain.
This article was written by Ty Oneil and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 26, 2025.
Roads in the 5,000-resident California town of Wrightwood were covered in rocks, debris and thick mud on Thursday. With power out, a gas station and coffee shop running on generators were serving as hubs for residents and visitors.
A day ago, heavy rain and fierce winds were blamed for at least two deaths
California, soaked from days of relentless rain and recovering from mudslides in mountain towns, was hit with another powerful storm Christmas Day that led to evacuation warnings and high surf advisories.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in Southern California issued an evacuation warning for Wrightwood, a mountain town about 130 kilometres northeast of Los Angeles, a day after rescuing people trapped in cars during a mud slide.
The National Weather Service said waves near the San Francisco Bay Area could reach up to 7.6 metres Friday.
Statewide, more than 70,000 people were without power Thursday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us.
A day ago, heavy rain and fierce winds were blamed for at least two deaths.
A major storm system moving toward the Midwest and Northeast was expected to interfere with travel, according to the National Weather Service.
A mix of freezing rain and sleet could create icy conditions in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Maryland. Forecasters warned heavy ice could cause outages. Snow was expected to blanket the Northeast early Friday
Roads in the 5,000-resident California town of Wrightwood were covered in rocks, debris and thick mud on Thursday. With power out, a gas station and coffee shop running on generators were serving as hubs for residents and visitors.
“It’s really a crazy Christmas,” said Jill Jenkins, who was spending the holiday with her 13-year-old grandson, Hunter Lopiccolo.
Hunter said the family almost evacuated the previous day, when water washed away a chunk of their backyard. But they decided to stay and still celebrated the holiday. Hunter got a new snowboard and e-bike.
“We just played card games all night with candles and flashlights,” he said.
Davey Schneider hiked 1.6 kilometres through rain and flood water up to his shins from his Wrightwood residence Wednesday to rescue cats from his grandfather’s house, walking through flood water up to his shins as it rained.
“I wanted to help them out because I wasn’t confident that they were going to live,” Mr. Schneider said Thursday. “Fortunately, they all lived. They’re all okay – just a little bit scared.”
Arlene Corte said roads in town turned into rivers, but her house was not damaged.
“It could be a whole lot worse,” she said. “We’re here talking.”
With more rain on the way, more than 150 firefighters were stationed in the area, said San Bernardino County Fire spokesman Shawn Millerick. “We’re ready,” he said. “It’s all hands on deck at this point.”
A falling tree killed a San Diego man Wednesday, news outlets reported. Farther north, a Sacramento sheriff’s deputy died in what appeared to be a weather-related crash.
Areas along the coast, including Malibu, were under a flood watch until Friday afternoon, and wind and flood advisories were issued for much of the Sacramento Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The storms were the result of atmospheric rivers carrying massive plumes of moisture from the tropics during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year.
Southern California typically gets 1.3 to 2.5 centimetres of rain this time of year, but this week many areas could see between 10 to 20 centimetres, with even more in the mountains, National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Wofford said.
More heavy snow was expected in the Sierra Nevada, where gusts created “near whiteout conditions” and made mountain pass travel treacherous. Officials said there was a “high” avalanche risk around Lake Tahoe and a winter storm warning was in effect through Friday.
Ski resorts around Lake Tahoe recorded about 30 to 91 centimetres of snow overnight, said Tyler Salas, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Reno. Forecasters expect to see up to another 91 centimetres of snow through Friday, Mr. Salas said. The area could see 72-km/h gusts in low elevation areas and 161-km/h winds along mountain ridges.
Governor Gavin Newsom declared emergencies in six counties to allow state assistance.
This article was written by Yang Sun and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 24, 2025.
A resident shovels snow after a winter storm in Halifax on Christmas Day in 2024. A Globe analysis found that 38 of the 42 cities with complete temperature data have seen warmer Decembers when comparing recent years to the historical average.
Globe analysis found while most Canadians still get a white Christmas, there has been less snow compared to historical average
Most Canadians still wake up to snow-blanketed streets on Christmas morning. Last year, 76 per cent enjoyed a white Christmas, defined by Environment and Climate Change Canada as at least two centimetres of snow on the ground by 7 a.m. on Dec. 25. But the experience of trudging through knee-deep drifts is becoming less likely as Decembers grow warmer and snowfall declines.
A Globe and Mail analysis of 50 years of weather data from 43 cities and ski destinations shows that while white Christmases remain frequent, snow depth is shrinking. In the past five years, 27 locations have seen thinner snowpacks – accumulated snow – compared with their long-term averages, calculated from 1975 to 2024.
The steepest declines are in places that Canadians often associate with winter wonderlands. Banff and Whistler, two of the country’s most famous ski destinations, have experienced some of the largest Christmas Day snow losses on the ground among all cities studied. That does not mean a snowless Christmas in the mountains. Both destinations still record snow on most Dec. 25s, easily clearing the two-centimetre threshold. But the data show that the snowpack is, on average, noticeably shallower than it was a few decades ago.
A similar pattern appears in several Quebec cities along the northern stretch of the St. Lawrence River, traditionally a cold and snowy corridor. These communities still see white Christmases most years, but the depth of snow on the ground has been trending downward at a relatively faster pace than in most other cities analyzed by The Globe.
The thinning snow is closely tied to rising December temperatures. Studies have linked the reduction in snowpack to humancaused global warming, and showed that even a modest increase in temperature could translate into a major reduction in snowpack. The Globe’s analysis found that 38 of the 42 cities with complete temperature data have experienced warmer Decembers when comparing recent years to the historical average.
Snow accumulated on the ground is primarily influenced by temperature and the amount of snowfall. Precipitation almost always starts as snow high in the clouds. Whether it reaches the ground as snow or rain depends on the temperature of the atmosphere layers it falls through. If the lower layers are warm, the snow melts into rain. If the air stays cold all the way down, it remains snow, said Lawrence Mudryk, a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Dr. Mudryk attributes the shift toward more rain than snow throughout the winter to climate change. “What you might see more of in the future is increased amounts of rain before Christmas, and then that reduces the total amount of accumulation of snow that we see by Christmas.”
Most of Canada’s population lives in the southern part of the country, an area that has traditionally guaranteed snowy winters. That snow line has shifted further north, and many Canadian cities now experience winters with alternating rain and snow.
“Snow and ice are an iconic part of the Canadian landscape. We might have to look to warmer locations and see how they already celebrate holidays,” Dr. Mudryk said. “But it’s more than just the cultural impact. More importantly, there are also environmental and ecosystem impacts as well.”
The country’s three largest metropolitan areas illustrate how those national trends play out locally in very different winter climates.
MONTREAL
In Montreal, Christmas still reliably arrives with snow on the ground, but the blanket is thinning. Average snow depth on Dec. 25 has fallen by nearly 40 per cent in recent years compared with the long-term average since 1975. At the same time, December temperatures have warmed sharply by nearly three degrees, while average daily snowfall has declined.
The result is not fewer white Christmases, but a noticeably lighter snowpack than past generations would not have expected in one of Canada’s coldest major cities.
TORONTO
The long-term and recent average snow depth on Christmas Day remain fairly unchanged in Toronto, but that doesn’t mean uneventful year-to-year change. In fact, the city has swung between deep snowpacks and bare ground on Christmas over the past 50 years.
Toronto’s December temperatures have warmed by 2.1 degrees Celsius to -0.2°C in recent years, hovering right at the freezing point where precipitation can fall as either rain or snow. At these milder temperatures, Toronto’s white Christmas has become increasingly dependent on the timing of winter storms rather than consistent seasonal accumulation.
VANCOUVER
Christmas Day snow records in Vancouver tell a story of how unusual and brutal Arctic chills can dramatically reshape holiday experiences. A city known for its grey, rainy winters has seen snow on the ground only about half the time over the past five decades.
But when Arctic-origin cold air pushes much farther south than normal, the Lower Mainland can experience substantial snowfall – and those rare events have delivered Vancouver’s only true white Christmases. During 2008, Vancouver recorded the seconddeepest Christmas snowpack among 43 cities analyzed, just behind Saguenay, Que.
Environment Canada warns more rain is expected across the already saturated Fraser Valley
This article was written by the Canadian Press and was published in the Toronto Star on December 14, 2025.
Abbotsford, B.C., resident Teresa Vogel showed up at Delair Park where her son plays baseball on Saturday to see the damage from floodwaters after heavy rain flooded parts of the city, closing roads including a stretch of the TransCanada Highway.
Vogel said it was “devastating” and she was shocked to see the baseball diamond surrounded by water, although it had receded since the day before.
“I can’t believe I was walking on that field months ago, and now you can’t even go down there,” she said. “When we got the news that it was flooded here at Delair, it was shocking, more shocking when you come and see it in person.”
The City of Abbotsford said floodwaters were receding Saturday, with some areas seeing significant improvement, but the TransCanada Highway remained closed and drivers were being warned against trying to get around flooded areas.
Environment Canada warned more rain is expected across the already saturated Fraser Valley, with the latest forecast calling for a “potentially significant push of moisture” on Monday and into early next week. The agency was also warning of an increased risk of landslides, as the rainfall may destabilize slopes.
Not far from from the flooded baseball field, a business complex was closed due to an evacuation order, but many drivers ignored road closure signs and could be seen barrelling through a flooded portion near the complex’s entrance.
Dean Jeffery works at a veterinary clinic in the complex, and said it was a “waiting game” watching the rains last week.
He said his home in the Huntington Village area has been under evacuation alert, and it was ordered evacuated in 2021 when flooding devastated Abbotsford following heavy rain.
Jeffrey said his neighbourhood has seen some flooding this time, but his home has been spared. “We haven’t been asked to leave this time, so it can’t be as bad,” he said. “Although I don’t know what Monday’s going to bring, or Tuesday.”
The city issued a statement Saturday warning that water continues to flow across the border from the Nooksack River in Washington State, where it first overflowed on Wednesday.
The statement said side roads were still flooded, adding that online maps have been showing inaccurate information about roads that remain closed.
As for the main highway, it said there was “currently no way through” Abbotsford and Chilliwack to get to the eastern reaches of B.C.
Kelly Green, B.C.’s emergency management minister, has said about 450 properties in B.C. have been evacuated, most of them in Abbotsford, with 1,700 under evacuation alert.
This opinion was written by Caitlin Stall-Paquet and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 13, 2025.
One of the earliest invasive species identified in North America is creeping thistle. Native to Europe, Africa and Asia the plant is also known by the misleading name ‘Canada thistle’.
Mitigating the spread of invasive species and supporting our communities’ biodiversity contributes to ensuring their resilience, as well as our lives within them, Caitlin Stall-Paquet writes
Mount Royal Park – the Mountain by its local name – is more of a glorified knoll, but it remains Montreal’s crown jewel, its lungs and heart.
It bears the pressure of greeting some five million annual visitors, but another source of ecological stress are invasives. These non-native species (plants, animals, fungi, microbes and humans, depending on who you ask) bend ecosystems to their will, much like the colonizers who introduced plenty of them. European views of superiority in the 17th and 18th centuries came with a slew of imported plants, altering landscapes in a way that reflected anxieties about dominating new spaces and the people in them.
On an unseasonably hot day in September, 2024, I volunteered with Les Amis de La Montagne for the first time, a non-profit that hosts invasive species management activities in the 10-squarekilometre park.
The environmental stewardship program and volunteer activities lead at Les Amis de la Montagne, Benjamin Pilon, gave us a quick run-through on using an extractigator – a tool designed for yanking out small trees via a lever mechanism that hooks around thin trunks, pulling them out, roots and all, when you push down on the handle. Alongside a dozen or so volunteers, I walked into a targeted patch of shady forest to rip up and cut down common buckthorn. This shrub grows up to four metres, growing glossy leaves with serrated edges, like the teeth of saw blades. The extractigator’s metal covered in orange lacquer was heavy and smooth, cooling my hands as my ponytail’s rogue strands stuck to the sweat on the back of my neck. I wielded the tool like a weapon, as I walked through the forest looking for the next buckthorn, a wannabe Ripley from Alien armed with a tree-puller instead of a flame-thrower.
Other volunteers sweated alongside me, our grunts mixing with the sound of cracking branches. Felled trees began to pile up along a footpath. A few hours later, the piles were taller than me, leaving plenty of open spots in the woods where native species can grow back more easily, a small but measurable effort in supporting our city’s remaining wild patches.
Activities like these play roles on many fronts: Mitigating the spread of invasive species and supporting our communities’ biodiversity contributes to ensuring their resilience, as well as our lives within them. Though extreme weather events keep piling up like those buckthorn trunks, biodiversity and climate issues have been nearly absent from government action since Prime Minister Mark Carney came to power, in favour of economic development – true to the last federal election’s campaign discourse.
We also have plenty to gain individually from these actions, as studies show that spending time outdoors lowers stress levels and restores energy. However, a 2024 report published in the journal Nature highlights that an active connection with these spaces is what fosters benefits. This means getting our hands dirty acquaints us with the outdoors, potentially providing elation akin to meeting a new friend. Along with feeling more rooted in our communities, participating in volunteer biodiversity activities and data-gathering citizen science contributes to filling scientific knowledge gaps, mapping our rapidly changing surroundings, as professionals don’t have the resources or human power to keep up. And combatting fast-proliferating invasive species is a seriously underfunded realm. According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, nearly 500 invasive plants are spreading across the country. Containing these species is a David versus Goliath endeavour, with province-by-province funding hovering around the few-million-dollar mark annually – no match for species often getting a boost from warming climes.
While learning about our environments, we also need to unravel preconceived notions of how they ended up in this state. In her book Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing, Indigenous invasive species specialist Dr. Jennifer Grenz digs into her experience of being educated in Western science traditions, while keeping her Indigenous identity separate from her work. Only after 20 years of field work did she shift toward on-the-ground learning with First Nation communities and elders, integrating Indigenous needs and knowledge into her scientific work on invasive species.
Dr. Grenz highlights a persistent idea surrounding the management of these plants: People create a narrative of “before” and “after” colonization, in which removing invasives and planting natives is seen as restoring a space to its natural state. This is what she calls Eden Ecology: misconceptions that pre-colonial lands were pristine, untouched ecosystems. In reality, those places never existed, since Indigenous people had been stewarding lands for millennia when settlers arrived. Stewardship through learning and participation is what she promotes, too. “I hope that as you read, you understand what is behind this quest to decolonize and Indigenize ecological restoration so that we can heal the land together,” Dr. Grenz writes.
According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, nearly 500 invasive plants are spreading across the country. Containing these species is a David versus Goliath endeavour, with province-by-province funding hovering around the few-milliondollar mark annually – no match for species often getting a boost from warming climes.
Les Amis de la Montagne also aims to educate the people who walk, run, bike, ski and snowshoe along the mountain’s paths, namely about the 20 or so invasives that took root in its clay-rich soils, including the buckthorn I gleefully yanked. Biologists think the tree was first introduced in New England in the 18th century for its purgative properties. Though beloved by rodents and the birds that spread their seeds, its berries the colour of onyx with a purple sheen become a powerful laxative in human digestive tracts. They were given to sick people to allegedly purge them of toxins, an early omen that this bush had the power to make things go down the toilet.
This type of buckthorn is present throughout urban parks in northeastern Canada and the United States, growing into dense shrubbery beneath taller trees, bending undergrowth to its will. It prevents other plants from germinating and its fallen leaves produce emodin as they decompose – a molecule poisonous to some amphibians. Below the surface, its roots alter soil, raising pH and nitrogen levels, making grounds more humid. These tweaks affect native plants not equipped with quick adaptation, creating forests less hospitable to butterflies and beetles, while the shrub’s low, thin branches force nesting birds closer to grounds where predators roam.
Montreal’s mountain has seen its fair share of overhauls over the centuries. Designed by Frederick Olmsted, the landscape architect who carved out a chunk of Manhattan to create Central Park, Mount Royal Park was established in 1876 as a place of refuge where locals could breathe easier in an increasingly industrialized city. In the 1950s, then-mayor Jean Drapeau ordered that hundreds of trees be cut and brush cleared in the name of so-called morality. (The park was popular with gay men.)
Once again, human anxieties were reflected in ecological control, but what became dubbed the “morality cuts” had considerable impacts, beyond homophobia. Damaged roots led to erosion, which destroyed all but one of the mountain’s wetlands, taking amphibians, birds and insects with them, and making the woods a whole lot quieter. The disrupted ground, exposed to the sun and prying eyes alike, was an openhouse party for plants, like the resilient buckthorn that luxuriates where the light gets in.
The second time I volunteered with Les Amis de la Montagne, we were planting rather than yanking. I paired up with Eric Kwasi Nkansah, a young graduate from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. Together, we dug holes, alternating planting a dozen or so species, spacing out red oak, silver maple and black cherry trees, before watering them and covering the freshly packed earth with leaves for protection against approaching winter. Though we planted indigenous species, Les Amis de la Montagne contends with current realities – Montreal’s evolution into an urban environment, climate change and considerable changes to forests over the years, due to people and diseases alike. “We couldn’t go back in time even if we wanted to. Instead, our approach emphasizes helping the forest to regenerate and stay healthy in the future by focusing on diversity and species that are able to adapt,” says Benjamin Pilon.
The third time I volunteered was a sunny May morning earlier this year. There were no extractigators in sight, though. Instead, we were there to remove more delicate invasives, an inaugural activity to kick off their season of stewardship. We gathered at the Mountain’s lookout facing the downtown’s high-rises, sharing coffee and granola bars before heading toward a weedy zone. I walked alongside Thérèse Nadeau, who has been signing up for these activities for decades.
“We feel like we’re participating in something that’s bigger than ourselves. We learn the importance of living with nature rather than possessing it,” she said of her open-air classroom.
Ms. Nadeau started volunteering at the Mountain after the 1998 storm, removing trees broken under the weight of 30 millimetres of ice. The wood was piled high for pickup, reminiscent of mayor Drapeau’s moralizing chop. The storm led the city to cut 5,200 trees on the Mountain and pruning another 45,000, which made more space for plants like the common buckthorn.
May is prime time to target certain species that sprout early, before they’ve spread their seeds through flowers, like the ground elder, a ground cover whose leaves form thick green carpets. Unlike the buckthorn, this lacy growth needs to be broken off gently at the stem, leaving roots in place so that they get stressed when producing new shoots rather than being stimulated when a chunk remains buried out of sight. I pulled on gloves and pads before getting down on my knees. The scent of chlorophyll wafted up as I gently snapped stems between my index and thumb. I removed my gloves, finding the delicate work easier with the skin of my fingers uncovered.
The pile of leaves grew as I cleared space, revealing dirt where surrounding native plants would have more room to grow, and eventually young students would deploy native-plant seed bombs. Adding a handful to the pile, a woman in athletic gear walking with her husband watched me, worried. She asked me what I was doing, concerned for the stalks I was snapping. I explained that I was volunteering to contain an invasive species. It took me a second to remember its tongue-twistery French name: égopode podagraire. I went back to carefully plucking, down on the ground elder’s level. After an hour, we placed the removed plants in sacks and weighed them: six kilograms of ground elder and 18 kg of garlic mustard. A small dent, but a start toward something new. Sweaty and satisfied at the sight of a measurable difference, for the time being, it was enough.
This article was written by Jenn Thornhill Verma and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 4, 2025.
Mr. Hawkins developed a specialized camera rig to film dangerous rescue missions of North American right whales. His footage can be seen on The Wild Ones, a wildlife documentary now screening on Apple TV.
This is the seventh and final story in a series on Canada-U.S. cross-border measures to protect North Atlantic right whales.
North Atlantic right whales are teetering dangerously close to functional extinction – the point at which there are too few animals to recover – yet they are dying from known problems with known solutions.
Researchers know what the risks are: mostly fishing gear entanglements and vessel strikes, but also ocean noise pollution caused by human activity and climate change shifting where the whales feed. Policy makers know what to do: Remove fishing lines to reduce the risk of entanglement, reroute and slow vessels, and implement these protections wherever the whales travel.
Yet despite this knowledge, only 384 North Atlantic right whales remain, including 72 mothers. While these numbers represent slow growth in recent years, the population is a fraction of historic abundance.
The gap between knowing and doing has frustrated scientists for decades. “We’re trained to get the facts, show the facts, prove with the facts,” says Nadine Lysiak, a wildlife and ocean health research scientist at the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. “But I just don’t think we live in a society where that matters as much as we want it to.”
Michael J. Moore, a veterinary scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, puts it more bluntly: “The bottom line is the bottom line: It’s all about money.” While a “conservation lobby” pushes for measures to reduce whale deaths, Dr. Moore says a stronger “consumer lobby unintentionally is pushing exactly the opposite direction. They want to have more ships, faster ships, more deliveries and more seafood.”
Yet public opinion offers hope. A 2024 Ipsos poll of 1,053 Americans, commissioned by Oceana, an international ocean conservation organization, found that 86 per cent of U.S. voters believe right whales should be protected from human-caused threats. In Canada, a 2019 unpublished Abacus Data survey of 1,850 Canadians, commissioned by Oceana Canada, found that despite 68 per cent of respondents knowing nothing about right whales, 96 per cent said it was important that the government of Canada protect them.
The poll findings suggest that the disconnect is not about public interest – it’s about translating that into meaningful change.
The gap between knowing and doing has been a throughline of the Entangled series. Over the past year, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network, The Globe investigated the plight of North Atlantic right whales – drawing on more than 60 scientific studies, government reports and datasets, nearly 50 interviews with scientists, policy makers, fishers and advocates, and records tracking 32 individual whales. The series examined the threats – entanglements, vessel strikes, habitat shifts and ocean noise – and the policies to address them. Now, as the series closes, we return to where we began: the people working to change the outcome.
The Globe spoke to six people – including scientists, educators and rescue organizers – who have taken up action to protect the right whale to understand what compels them and what it will take to close the implementation gap.
1. SEE THE WHALES AS RELATIVES
Bradford Lopes of the Aquinnah Wôpanâak tribe in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., draws on oral traditions that tell of Moshup, a benevolent giant who transformed his children into killer whales to protect them from the harm of settlers.
For Wôpanâak people, right whales aren’t just endangered animals – they’re family.
“It is devastating in a way that I struggle to explain,” Mr. Lopes says. “It’s no different than losing your own family. It’s heartbreaking. Because they’re our cousins.”
Last year, Mr. Lopes held a workshop on the Wôpanâak’s connection to the whales at the North Atlantic Right Whales Consortium, the largest gathering of right whale researchers.
The Wôpanâak have fought to remain in their homelands despite centuries of displacement and cultural erasure. “When I see their story, I see a story that we not only know spiritually, but we know historically.”
The parallel runs deep. “This is something that we’ve experienced with Wôpanâak people in lots of ways. I can relate to that. There’s a very visceral kind of relation there.”
But Mr. Lopes also finds hope in the whales’ persistence. “The other thing I see reflected is their continuance, this fight, this spirit, about not disappearing from their home waters and to hang on.”
As Mr. Lopes told The Globe in April when discussing one of last season’s mothers, Nauset (known under the identification code #2413 in the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog): “I see these mothers as I see our own mothers. I see our grandmothers, and I see that fight,” he said. “The reason why we’re still here as Wôpanâak people is our women – the strength they’ve had and the fight they’ve had, but also the vision they’ve had.”
This world view – whales as relatives rather than resources – represents what Dr. Moore calls the “only hope” for the species. “There has to be a fundamental change in how we view these animals,” Dr. Moore argues.
2. START YOUNG AND STAY CURIOUS
In the small coastal town of Castine, Maine, middle school science teacher Bill McWeeny posed a simple question to his students in 2004: “How’d you like to help a really big animal?”
“I introduced them to the right whales,” Mr. McWeeny recalls. “And that was that.”
Mr. McWeeny’s teaching philosophy is built on experience rather than textbooks. He brought researchers into the classroom and took his students – who called themselves “The Calvineers” after Calvin (#2223) the right whale – to scientific conferences.
For student Molly McEntee, one of the first Calvineers, the pivotal moment came on a whale-watching trip to the Bay of Fundy in Grade 8.
“We’d already spent two years talking about them and learning about them, and it was just really exciting to see them in real life,” she says.
Dr. McEntee is now a marine biologist studying elephant seals in California.
The Calvineers didn’t just study whales – they took action. “Once we had the facts like Calvin’s mother was killed by a ship, then we could advocate for changing shipping lanes,” Mr. McWeeny says. (Advocacy had worked before: As The Globe reported in June, Transport Canada rerouted Bay of Fundy vessel traffic around the Grand Manan Basin in 2003, marking the first time in International Maritime Organization history that shipping lanes were moved to protect a marine mammal species.)
The students wrote letters to lawmakers, their youth giving them unique power as messengers. “You get a bunch of kids up there who have done their homework, who do not have the agenda that adults have, and they’re saying all the same conservation messages – it just hits different,” Dr. McEntee says.
Twenty years on, the legacy extends far beyond the few students who took up ocean conservation vocations. “This small group of kids at this small school is, over the years, accumulating into a lot of people in the state who really know more about this than most adults,” Dr. McEntee says.
3. UNDERSTAND THAT NEWS MEDIA SHAPES POLICY
As a PhD student at the University of South Carolina, Amadi Afua Sefah-Twerefour initially planned to study how risks to North Atlantic right whales differ across their various habitats, having previously studied oceanography and fisheries in her home country of Ghana, and ocean engineering in South Korea. But as she dug deeper into her research, she realized something crucial was missing.
“If the main risk is from human activities, then there’s a whole new side to this – what compels social change?” she asks. That realization led her to pivot to analyzing how news coverage shapes public understanding and policy response.
“We understand the facts. We are still learning a lot more about the species. But we realize there’s still a disconnect in our efforts and how effective they are,” she says.
Ms. Sefah-Twerefour’s research, the findings of which are not yet published but currently in peer review, scraped tens of thousands of news articles since 2000 about right whales globally, creating a database that tracks volume of coverage, how stories are framed and when they appear relative to key policy decisions.
“Even if there are diverse opinions or people on opposite sides, the media can actually be that connecting agent,” she said, adding that journalism can point to workable solutions.
Coverage that crosses borders (right whales migrate between U.S. calving grounds and Canadian feeding grounds) while rare, is especially important, Ms. Sefah-Twerefour says.
“Even if one country is able to be excellent at protecting the species, it eventually is watered down if the other is not.”
Despite never having seen a right whale, Ms. Sefah-Twerefour can name individual whales such as Punctuation (#1281) and Clipper (#3450), both dead – their stories burned into her memory through repeated news media coverage. One image particularly haunts her: the 2021 calf of Infinity (#3230), struck and killed by a vessel off Florida’s coast in February that year. “I keep seeing the images of that calf with marks across the back.”
4. BEAR WITNESS AND DOCUMENT THE REALITY
Nick Hawkins started as a whalewatching tour guide in his 20s on the Bay of Fundy. Now a conservation filmmaker based in Fredericton, he’s spent nearly a decade developing techniques to safely film right whales – work that resulted in unprecedented footage of a successful disentanglement for Apple TV’s wildlife documentary The Wild Ones, released this year.
The journey began with a moment Mr. Hawkins cannot forget. In 2019, he got a call that a dead whale, Punctuation (#1281), had been towed to a remote beach for necropsy.
“I had never seen a whale like that. Despite being around whales for years, there’s a big difference in seeing it out of the water compared to on the surface.”
Standing next to it, seeing the whale lice still moving, the baleen (the keratin filter-feeding “teeth” in the whale’s mouth), the eye – “it’s like standing next to this completely alien creature.” That encounter changed his perception.
Mr. Hawkins recognized early that “there wasn’t really any highquality footage of North Atlantic
From the ocean to the classroom, and from Atlantic Canada to the U.S. South, these advocates are finding ways to save a species before it vanishes
right whales. They live in remote areas. Underwater isn’t an option [because of permits]. And that was a real problem.” Researchers had so far collected footage, but it did not meet the broadcast standards necessary for reaching broad audiences.
The solution required years of work: buying a boat capable of reaching whales 30 nautical miles offshore, mastering both seamanship and whale behaviour, and lobbying government to acquire species at risk permits in order to document the whales that had never been granted to a filmmaker before. He designed camera systems that could withstand being soaked on a bouncing boat while flying drones and managing audio – all solo. He also became a trained whale disentangler through the Campobello Whale Rescue Team course, a requirement for anyone on the rescue boat.
It took three summers before all conditions aligned – finding the whale (the yearling Athena, then known as #5312), calm seas and a successful rescue.
The danger of disentangling a whale is real. “It’s a scary thing to be that close to an animal that weighs 40 to 80 tonnes, and that animal is distressed and scared, and it does not want you there,” he says.
His drone work proved to have unexpected benefits beyond filming. Flying above the whale, he could tell the rescue team “it’s right there, it’s crossing under the boat, it’s going to port, it’s going to starboard.” This allowed perfect positioning. “It’s a matter of inches. When that whale comes up, you gun the boat in, the cutter reaches [the line] – it’s inches that make the difference.”
Now Mr. Hawkins is helping train others to use drones in rescues. “The drone is one of, if not the most important tool in whale rescue, other than the cutting tool,” he says. But he’s careful about credit: “The real heroes are the whale rescuers. I’ve been an asset to them. It’s one more tool in the tool box.”
5. LEARN TO CO-EXIST – FROM SETTING TRAPS TO SETTING WHALES FREE
When the Atlantic cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s, Mackie Greene, then only 12, found himself adrift. He had spent his childhood summers fishing the waters around Campobello Island, N.B. “There were a few boats whale watching around here, so I got a little boat and started myself.”
For 26 years, Mr. Greene ran whale-watching tours. On the water, he witnessed something troubling – whales tangled in fishing gear, suffering, with no organized response to help.
Mr. Greene understood better than most that fishermen were not villains in this story. “There’s not a fisherman out there that ever wants to catch a whale,” he says. “He’s losing his gear, he’s losing his catch, he’s going to waste time looking for his gear.
It’s just a nightmare for the fishermen to catch a whale.”
Mr. Greene first encountered whale rescue after he was sent by the province to Cape Cod’s Center for Coastal Studies. But he credits his fishing background most – years of handling rope and reading the water – for preparing him to rescue whales.
In 2002, Mr. Greene and fellow fisherman Joseph (Joe) Howlett co-founded the Campobello Whale Rescue Team at the Canadian Whale Institute as volunteers with minimal government support. Their approach stood out: “Our motto has always been fishermen helping fishermen. We’re not there to condemn the fishermen. We’re there to help them,” says Mr. Greene, now the director of whale rescue at the Canadian Whale Institute.
The emotional rewards made the risks worthwhile: “When you set a whale free, there’s just no feeling like it. I always say it feels like you can jump out of the boat and run home.”
But there was also heartbreak if a rescue attempt fails: “When you don’t get a whale disentangled, it’s that long, quiet ride home.”
In 2017, Mr. Howlett, 59, was fatally struck in the head by a right whale’s tail immediately after freeing the female whale (#4123) from fishing gear. “Joe’s funeral was the biggest funeral Campobello has ever seen,” Mr. Greene remembers. “The church was solid full. Everybody loved Joe.”
After an extensive investigation, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans implemented sweeping safety reforms in 2018. Responders who had been volunteers now receive paid positions and insurance coverage. The department also developed national procedures for federal fishery officers during disentanglement operations and created specialized training for marine mammal response teams.
Today, Mr. Greene is one of only a handful of people in the country who can lead a whale disentanglement. On July 10, 2024, seven years to the day when Mr. Howlett died, the Campobello team successfully disentangled Athena (#5312) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence – the same whale whose rescue Mr. Hawkins filmed.
The responsibility weighs on Mr. Greene, but also fills him with purpose. “These whales are so endangered right now, with just 70 breeding females, every one we can save really makes a big difference,” he says.
6. MEET PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE – AT THE MARINA
At seven years old, Lydia (Liddy) Clever was fed up with the trash littering the beaches of Tybee Island in Chatham County, Ga. Georgia’s easternmost point, Tybee is a popular destination where beachgoers flock to its white sand shores – the same shores that serve as critical habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, manatees and the calving grounds for the North Atlantic right whale.
Liddy repurposed the collected debris from the beach – plastic bags and other trash – into braided bracelets to keep them out of the ocean. But she realized she could help stop the source of trash before it reached the sea by working with schools. She started “Tidy Tuesdays” at her elementary school, where half her class would pick up trash during recess one week, and the other half the next.
That’s when Liddy, now 11 years old, founded her non-profit, Save Sea Life.
“Our mission is to educate kids at a young age to love the ocean so that when they get older, they don’t destroy it,” Liddy says.
In February, 2021, what washed up on Tybee’s shores moved Liddy to expand her mission: a right whale calf, the offspring of Infinity (#3230), struck and killed by a recreational vessel. “That’s when I really started getting into it, because not only big cargo ships are hurting right whales – small boats hurt them too,” she says.
This past year, Liddy and her mother visited roughly half the marinas in and around Savannah, Ga., to survey boaters about their awareness of right whales. “It was really awesome to see how many boaters did know about them,” she says.
But her findings also revealed a dangerous gap: While more boaters than expected had heard of the species, few understood how to identify them or what to do if they encountered one. That knowledge gap is particularly perilous in Georgia and northern Florida – the only known calving grounds for North Atlantic right whales – where mothers and newborns are most vulnerable to vessel strikes.
To help close that gap, Liddy is working with local government to distribute educational flyers when boats are registered – information “to tell them what to look for in the North Atlantic right whale and who to call if they do see one, how to stay away from them,” she says.
Liddy presented her research at this year’s North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium meeting.
Saving a species is a big job, but as Liddy insists, “No act is too small and you’re never too young to make a big difference.”
This story is part of a series produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.
Report points to an increase in pollutants, climate change pressures
This article was written by James Bullanoff and was published in the Toronto Star on November 27, 2025.
Efforts to improve the water quality of Lake Simcoe — a playground for swimmers, boaters, and tourists — have stalled as the lake faces “significant ecological stress,” a report says.
“While localized improvements have occurred, many key indicators are static or worsening,” says the report from the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition.
Jonathan Scott, executive director of the coalition, said the health of the lake is getting worse.
“To care about this lake and this region of the province is to care about the people who live here. The lake is the economic driver for tourism, for agriculture, and so many other factors,” said Scott.
In the face of pollutants, invasive species, climate change, urbanization and farming the report found a “mixed picture” for Lake Simcoe. Phosphorus concentrations have slightly declined — meaning less risk of algal blooms, low oxygen levels and degraded water quality — and deepwater oxygen levels have improved.
However, chloride levels from road salt runoff — which can hurt aquatic life — continue to rise, the report said. Climate change pressures are also having an impact causing, among other things, higher municipal expenses for stormwater systems and significant deferred maintenance for stormwater ponds and drainage, causing more contaminated water to enter the lake’s watershed.
The report also highlighted the increase in publichealth advisories and beach closures around the lake.
The report acts as a progress report for the Lake Simcoe Protection Plan (LSPP) which was launched in 2008 by the provincial government to monitor water quality, rising phosphorus pollution, and loss of lake trout and whitefish.
Just over an hour drive from Toronto, the Lake Simcoe watershed spans more than 3,400 square kilometres. The lake supports more than half a million residents in Barrie, Innisfil, and Orillia. It also supports a variety of ecosystems from cold water fish habitats to wetlands and woodlands.
The report includes 13 recommendations to improve the lake, such as modernizing and enforcing the provincial phosphorusreduction strategy, cutting property taxes to clean the lake, and investing in stormwater management and asset maintenance.
It also notes that the LSPP remains as “Ontario’s strongest watershedbased environmental strategy.”
“It is not broken, but it is under pressure,” the report says. “Its success depends not only on clear goals but on full commitment from governments, municipalities, conservation authorities and the public.”
Recently, Ontario announced it will centralize control of conservation authorities under a new provincial agency and will streamline development approvals.
“We want the provincial, federal, and other levels of government to come together and say we care about this lake and we want to protect the plan,” said Scott. “That protects the lake and that’s how we rescue Lake Simcoe.”
This article was written by Jordan Omstead and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 27, 2025.
Blasts of frigid Arctic air could send temperatures tumbling in December and herald the arrival of a more “traditional Canadian winter,” a meteorologist for the Weather Network predicts as it releases its seasonal outlook.
Most of Canada is expected to see near or colder than normal temperatures, and near or above normal precipitation and snow, says the network’s seasonal forecast for December, January and February.
There’s still some uncertainty about whether the second half of winter’s fury will be widespread or more focused on Western Canada, said meteorologist Doug Gillham.
What’s more certain is that it will be “December to remember,” he said. The forecast isn’t necessarily calling for a “historically severe winter,” Mr. Gillham said, but “it’s going to be a colder December and January than we’ve really become accustomed to seeing in many recent years.”
“When you step back and look at big picture, winter will show up this year and it’s going to show up in a big way to start the season.”
The country experienced its warmest winter on record two years ago ahead of last year’s more typical season, Mr. Gillham said. This year is expected to look more like last year, “but the signals for cold are actually a little bit stronger,” Mr. Gillham said.
One of those signals is the polar vortex, strong winds circling up to 50 kilometres above the Arctic that keep frigid air locked near the poles. A period of surging temperatures up in that part of the atmosphere is expected to disrupt the vortex and spill that cold out over Canada in December and January.
A second consecutive winter with a weak La Niña is also set to have a cooling influence, Mr. Gillham said. The climate pattern, tied to shifting patches of water in the Pacific Ocean, can often lead to colder and stormier conditions across much of Canada.
Put those two things together, the disrupted polar vortex and the weak La Niña, and the potential goes up for extended stretches of extreme temperatures, he said.
“So, if you enjoy winter activities, that’s good news. If you think, ‘I don’t need snow tires any more,’ well, you may want to rethink that,” Mr. Gillham said.
What counts as a typical or normal Canadian winter has changed over recent decades. While they fluctuate, average winter temperatures are about 3.7 degrees warmer now than in the mid-20th century as climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, reshapes Canada’s winter way of life.
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