Dear Canadian Media:
Toronto's daily weather is not national news. Please stop reporting it as such. This is getting ridiculous.
As my family and I bathed in the dark enveloping coolness of a four hour power outage at -30 degrees (not "feels like", but actually -30 as the true air temperature), we awoke to national headlines advising that Toronto was slushy, and that as a result of a coming "cold snap", the slush might freeze. I checked the temperature in Toronto: it's -5 degrees. Of course, it's getting as cold as -12 this evening and the overnight low tonight is... wait for it.... -19. The horror. Torontonians might have some ice, because that happens in freezing temperatures.
Last week, I recall hearing on CBC Radio One's morning national news accounts of people hearing cracking noises in Toronto when it dipped to a bone chilling -20 overnight. The fact that some cracking noises seemed unusual to some lake-front dwellers at that temperature informs us of just how infrequently it really reaches seriously cold temperatures in Canada's media darling, which also gives you some idea of how out-of-touch ol' Hogtown is with the climate in a large swath of this country. Lakes freeze at -20 - shifting ice and water make noises.
It's trite and a smidge self-righteous for me to point-out that we of the prairies have been living with daytime highs below -20 for several consecutive stretches in the last few months. Consider the people in the vast stretches of our territories north of 60: our prairie coldsnap probably seems quite tolerable to them. I do realize that the national media is reporting the Toronto weather as a function of relativity - perhaps it's currently colder than normal. I suppose that's news in some minor fashion - a sidebar to the local weather report. But it's not not national news - that's where this whole thing went off the rails. It's hard to solicit pity for the downtrodden residents of the Golden Horseshoe when their reported climatic suffering would constitute a thermal relief for a wide swath of the country. In Canada, overnight lows of -50 should attract some national consideration. Overnight lows of -20 are just "winter".
So seriously, Canadian Media, stop towing the line. Winter often sucks in this country, wherever you are. If you're in Vancouver, it's raining, if you're in the prairies or the north, it's bloody freezing, if you're on the east coast, it's storming, and if you're in Toronto.... well.... it's a damp cold, I guess (which, if you understood weather, indicates it's really not that cold). Let's just accept it, leave the complaints for the coffee shops and elevators, and get on with getting by until March. Stop reporting the woes of Toronto as national f*cking news. Couldn't you just dig-up a story on Rob Ford or something?
