Toronto’s winter runs from about December to March and it is colder than most visitors expect — daytime highs around minus 1 to minus 5°C, nights to minus 10 or lower, and cold snaps below minus 20 with wind chill.
The lake moderates it slightly and also produces the wind that makes it worse.
It is not, however, a bad time to come. Flights and hotels are at their cheapest, the museums are the point rather than an alternative, and the city has spent a century organising itself around the problem.
The PATH
Thirty kilometres of underground pedestrian tunnels beneath downtown, linking Union Station, the bank towers, the Eaton Centre, City Hall, the Hockey Hall of Fame, hotels and around 1,200 shops and restaurants.
It is the largest underground shopping complex in the world by the Guinness reckoning, and roughly 200,000 people use it daily.
It is also notoriously hard to navigate. Signage improved considerably with a wayfinding overhaul, but the system was built piecemeal by individual building owners and the geometry reflects that. Maps are posted; the app helps; getting lost is normal.
You can walk from Union Station to Dundas Street without going outside, which in February is not a novelty but a plan.
Note that much of the PATH is closed at weekends and in the evenings, because it runs through office buildings.
What to wear
Torontonians dress for it and visitors frequently do not.
Layers, a proper insulated coat, a hat that covers the ears, gloves, and — the one people get wrong — boots with grip. Sidewalks are salted but ice is constant, and dress shoes on a Toronto pavement in January are how people break wrists.
Indoors is heated to the point of discomfort, hence the layers.
The wind chill
Environment Canada publishes a wind chill figure alongside the temperature and it is the number to pay attention to. Minus 8 with a 30km/h wind feels like minus 18 and freezes exposed skin in about thirty minutes.
Extreme cold weather alerts trigger warming centres across the city.
What winter is good for
Skating. Free outdoor rinks across the city, the best-known at Nathan Phillips Square, plus Harbourfront, Trinity Bellwoods, the Bentway under the Gardiner, and Colonel Sam Smith’s skating trail. Skate hire at the larger ones; bringing your own is free.
The Christmas Market at the Distillery District from mid-November.
Winterlicious in late January and early February — a city-run promotion where several hundred restaurants do fixed-price menus, including several that are otherwise very hard to get into.
The ravines under snow, which are genuinely beautiful and almost empty.
Hockey — the Maple Leafs at Scotiabank Arena, tickets for which are expensive and hard to get, and the Marlies in the AHL, which are neither.
The lake
Lake Ontario does not usually freeze, but the shoreline does, and the ice formations along the Scarborough Bluffs and the islands are worth the trip.
Lake-effect snow mostly hits east of the city rather than Toronto itself.
Spring
March and April are the worst months — grey, wet, with snow that melts into slush and refreezes. The city calls it the fifth season and does not enjoy it.
The compensation is that when it turns, usually in late April, it turns quickly, and the High Park cherry blossom follows within days.
The lake effect, and what actually falls
Toronto gets around 120 centimetres of snow in an average winter, spread across the season rather than in single enormous falls. The heavy lake-effect snow belts are east and north of the city — Barrie and the Bruce Peninsula get considerably more.
What Toronto does get is freeze-thaw: snow, then a thaw, then a refreeze, which produces ice on every pavement. This is why boots matter more than a heavier coat.
The city keeps running
Schools and offices close only for genuinely severe storms. The TTC runs, the streetcars occasionally struggle, and the subway is unaffected because most of it is underground.
Snow clearing is by priority — expressways and arterial roads first, residential streets later, pavements later still and inconsistently.
Where to warm up
The ROM, the AGO and the Gardiner are all a few minutes from a subway station. St Lawrence Market is indoors. The PATH will take you across downtown without a coat.
The Allan Gardens Conservatory — six Victorian glasshouses near Cabbagetown, free, tropical and heated — is the best-kept winter secret in the city.
The one habit worth borrowing
Torontonians dress for the walk between buildings, not for the buildings. Indoors is heated to around 22°C, so the coat comes off constantly — which is why layers matter more than a single very heavy garment.
Everyone carries a bag for the coat, the hat and the gloves.