Ten Years of Canadian Weather, City by City

By Julia · weather-canada.com editorial team · Published 23 October 2026 · 5 min read

Ask a Canadian whether the climate has changed and you will get a story about a winter, a heat dome or a summer of smoke. Ten years of daily data cannot settle that question, and this article does not try. What ten years can do is show how differently the same decade played out from Halifax to Yellowknife: a country with one headline temperature does not exist.

The numbers come from the ERA5 reanalysis served by Open-Meteo, taken at the centre of ten cities and compared with the 1991–2020 normals printed on this site's city pages, which come from the same reanalysis. A reanalysis is not a thermometer. Its grid is about 25 kilometres wide, it smooths local extremes, and the normal comes from a grid cell while the archive is interpolated to the exact point, so differences of a few tenths of a degree are within the noise. For official station records, Environment and Climate Change Canada is the reference.

A warm decade, mostly in the middle and the far north

Averaged over 2016–2025, Winnipeg was 0.9 °C above its normal, Iqaluit 1.0 °C, Toronto 0.6 °C, Halifax 0.6 °C and Yellowknife 0.5 °C. Ottawa (+0.4) and Montréal (+0.3) were warmer by less. Then come three cities that did not warm at all in this window: Vancouver (−0.05), Edmonton (−0.03) and Calgary, which ran 0.4 °C below its normal.

The Calgary figure deserves caution, since it is a foothills site where the grid cell and the point sit at different heights. The pattern that matters is the contrast between the ocean-moderated west coast, the Alberta cities and the continental interior. Vancouver is the quiet one: its yearly mean never strays more than half a degree from 10.3 °C.

Year by year

Ten years, ten different personalities.

• 2016 opened warm in the west. Edmonton ran 1.4 °C above its normal and Yellowknife 1.5 °C. It was also the wettest year of the decade in Vancouver, at 2,589 mm in the reanalysis, and the driest in Toronto, at 670 mm.
• 2017 and 2018 were close to normal in the east and cooler in Alberta; Edmonton's mean fell from 5.0 °C in 2016 to 3.2 and then 2.6 °C.
• 2019 was the coldest year of the series in six of the ten cities: Toronto (8.2 °C), Montréal (5.2 °C), Ottawa (6.0 °C), Calgary (3.0 °C), Edmonton (2.1 °C) and Halifax (7.3 °C).
• 2020 reversed the east, with Toronto back at 9.7 °C, while Yellowknife recorded its coldest year of the decade at −5.1 °C.
• 2021 was Winnipeg's year: 5.8 °C against a 3.6 °C normal, and 27 days at 30 °C or more between May and September.
• 2022 went the other way in Manitoba. Winnipeg dropped to 2.6 °C, the lowest of its decade, with 899 mm of precipitation, the most of its ten years.
• 2023 was the warm one in the west and north. Yellowknife averaged −0.5 °C, 3.3 °C above its normal; Edmonton reached 5.4 °C. Halifax had its wettest year at 2,066 mm.
• 2024 was the warmest in the east and in Winnipeg: Toronto 10.3 °C, Montréal 7.5 °C, Ottawa 8.5 °C and Winnipeg 6.0 °C.
• 2025 was the warmest year in Iqaluit, at −5.4 °C, and close to normal in Toronto (8.9 °C) and Montréal (6.1 °C).

Two years that broke the pattern

The cross-country gap between 2019 and 2023 is the clearest result. In Edmonton, the mean went from 2.1 °C in 2019 to 5.4 °C in 2023, a difference of 3.3 degrees between two years. In Toronto the same pair reads 8.2 and 9.8 °C. A decade with this much year-to-year swing, anywhere from 1 to 3 degrees in the prairies, means no single winter or summer tells you how the climate is moving. It also means that when someone says "last year was..." the answer depends on which city they live in.

Rain follows its own calendar

Precipitation does not track temperature. Vancouver's yearly total ranged from 1,338 mm in 2019 to 2,589 mm in 2016, nearly double. Halifax moved from 1,258 mm in 2016 to 2,066 mm in 2023. The prairie cities are stingier and more stable: Calgary stays between 413 and 554 mm every year, Edmonton between 403 and 640 mm. A caution about the reanalysis: it blurs mountains and coasts, so Vancouver's totals are those of a 25-kilometre cell that may take in mountain slopes, and a gauge in the city could read lower. Compare cities with each other only with that in mind.

The extremes of the decade

Two things stand out in that table. The reanalysis gives Vancouver (36.4 °C on June 28, 2021) and Toronto (36.0 °C on June 24, 2025) almost the same summer peak as Calgary (36.7 °C) and Edmonton (35.7 °C), yet the cold side is wildly different: Vancouver's lowest night was −14.1 °C, Toronto's −25.2 °C, Edmonton's −41.2 °C. And Iqaluit, the coldest of the ten, never reached 25 °C. Yellowknife spans 78 degrees between its coldest night and its hottest day, Edmonton 77.

What ten years cannot tell you

Ten values per city do not make a trend. The warm-above-normal result for Winnipeg could be a stretch of luck as easily as a signal. What you can use them for is planning: expect a city's yearly mean to wander by a degree or two, expect your best and worst years to differ by three degrees or more if you live on the prairies, and expect the extremes of the table, rather than the averages, to decide what you should pack. The other articles in this series pick up each of those extremes: wind chill for the cold, Vancouver rain for the wet.

Period of the data cited: 2016–2025.