TORONTO - There was the blast of winter that froze Valentine's Day flower deliveries, the humid heat wave in the Prairies that forced hospitals to cancel surgical procedures and the ice jams that trapped hundreds of sealers off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
In other words, it was just another typically atypical year for the country's top climatologists, who continue to be amazed by how the weather can frustrate - and threaten - Canadians in unique ways every year.
Environment Canada's David Phillips puts together an annual Top 10 list of his biggest weather stories and usually has to comb through 70 to 100 candidates before deciding which had the biggest personal and economic impacts, and which were the strangest meteorological oddities.
"I grapple with it every year, there's no one story that really is dominant without question," Phillips said.
"And it's another year where we've had both extremes, surprises and records, and interesting conversation."
Sometimes the best stories revolve around relatively insignificant weather events, like the so-called "Valentine's Day Massacre," which Phillips said wasn't a record-setting storm but had a crippling effect nonetheless.
Several areas of the country were hit with some of the worst winter weather of the year, tying up traffic on a day when billions of dollars are spent on romantic dinners out and deliveries of flowers, chocolates and gift baskets.
"It was devastating for the florists and for restaurants and from an economic point of view it was probably a big hit," Phillips said.
It wasn't the worst Valentine's Day in recent memory, said Arman Patel, executive director of the industry association Flowers Canada, but it was definitely a bad year, and a lot of money was lost when deliveries couldn't be made and flowers shrivelled up in the cold.
"In the florist business, if you have a bad storm or bad weather conditions during the week of Valentine's Day, it just wreaks havoc," Patel said.
"You've got anywhere from 15,000 to 200,000 orders in any particular city going out to the consumer, so you can imagine the logistics of that when weather conditions are bad."
Sealers thought a relatively mild winter would ruin their annual hunt off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, but a last-minute flow of ice ended up a mixed blessing.
Big blue sheets of ice that shifted near shore allowed the hunt to go on as scheduled, but also ended up trapping more than 100 boats at sea, touching off weeks of worry for the families of sealers and sailors alike.
Mark Smalls, former president of the Canadian Sealers Association, said the ice conditions ended up being some of the worst in decades. It took three weeks before Coast Guard icebreakers could free the last of the ships, he said.
Although it's a time-honoured Canadian tradition to tell tales about surviving the elements of brutal winters, stories about sweltering summers also rank high on Phillips's lists.
The Prairies were abuzz all summer about the unprecedented months of stifling heat and humidity that not only worked up a collective public sweat, but also cancelled surgeries and stressed the power grid.
"They always pride themselves on having a dry heat," Phillips said.
"Well, boy, they got the damp heat, the Ontario heat, and set some new records in southern Saskatchewan and southern Manitoba. You couldn't buy an air conditioner, people were just stressed right out. People are still talking about it."
As temperatures reached the high 30s and humidity made it feel like the low 40s, the unbearable heat was more than just uncomfortable and inconvenient - it also caused problems in the health-care system.
Air conditioners were overloaded at two Winnipeg hospitals, forcing the cancellation of dozens of surgeries during one particularly hot week. The weather left surgical instruments damp, which increases the risk of contamination, and staff were left exhausted trying to work through the heat.
"In my almost 18 years in the system, I can't recall a situation (like this) before," Dr. Brock Wright, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority's chief medical officer, said at the time.
And the situation was even worse in Regina, where hundreds of surgeries were postponed due to complications arising from the heat.
"We're just not built in Saskatchewan for this kind of humidity," said Trent Truscott, executive director of surgery with the Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region.
With no shortage of significant weather events affecting the country each year, Phillips said he can't get over the fact that weather-related deaths remain relatively rare.
"There's no gentle weather in Canada. We are the second most tornado-prone country, we get four or five tropical storms every year, we have temperatures that range from plus 40C to minus 50C - you would expect to see a much higher casualty rate from weather," Phillips said.
"Weather kills people in ones and twos, it doesn't kill 50 people or 100 people like you would read about in other parts of the world. More people die from falling out of bed than from weather in Canada, and year after year that holds true."
