After 48 years with the federal government, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist, Dave Phillips, still answers his own phone. And whether it is CBC’s national chief correspondent or a weekly newspaper reporter from rural Saskatchewan, Phillips always has time to talk to journalists about the weather.
“I’m not a cherry picker,” he told Yorkton This Week from his home in Barrie, Ontario. “If it was Peter Mansbridge phoning me wanting to do an interview or you, I would say whoever phoned first would get the interview and then I would followup with the second.”
Last week not only did Phillips grant an interview, but he pulled all the current and historical data for Yorkton and did an in-depth analysis of this winter on his train ride home from Toronto (see story on Page A11).
“The thing that motivates me is just the questions you asked yesterday before I left,” he said. “I dug up the data and I was just so excited in going through the data and looking at the records and seeing, well, okay, I was a little disappointed that December wasn’t as record warm and maybe not an all-time record for October-November-December, but then I thought, look at those days below [minus]-20, there’s only five of them and then I thought, I wonder what normal would be? Even though the averages are not record-level, the single days you’ve had [is low]. Then you got a little taste around Christmas-Boxing Day and I’m sure people thought, ‘my God, the cold has arrived and now we’re in for the long haul,’ and then all of a sudden you see single digit temperatures occurring during early January and late December. It’s this back and forth kind of yo-yo weather that is so El Niño-like. It’s something I love to do, so it’s really a labour of love for me, it’s not work.
“I love what I do. I feel like if I was in Malta or Cypress, there would be nobody who would listen to me. Canadians, we love the weather, particularly prairie people. I’m going out there and speaking at Manitoba Ag days not next week but the week after I think, and I was invited to speak in Saskatoon to the Poultry Association of Saskatchewan and also to the watershed people in March, but I’m on holidays, so I do take time off, but I just feel I’m so lucky. I’ve been working for this service for 48 years. I could have retired 13 years ago on full pension, but I love what I do because I get to talk about Canadians’ passion, which is the weather.
For Phillips, who had different plans for his life, it was a love that almost came about by accident.
Phillips grew up in Windsor, Ontario and always wanted to be a teacher. After high school, he studied geography at the University of Windsor graduating in 1966. He still wanted to teach, but got a job offer from the Meterological Branch of Transport Canada to do research on the Great Lakes.
“I thought maybe what I’ll do is I will go for it, just a year, then I could always change,” he said. “Well, that was 48 years ago. I’ve had two jobs in my lifetime, I was a room service waiter at the Banff Springs Hotel and a climatologist, so I always felt there was something I could fall back on if the weather business got a little rough.”
While with Transport Canada, Phillips pursued and received a Master’s from the University of Toronto.He produced many reports from his research including a famous article on the Climatic Severity Index that ranked 150 locations in Canada based on the severity of their weather. The attention the article garnered led to his first brush with the media.
“I was asked by my bosses back in the 1970s to talk to the media about the cold weather. I said I didn’t want to do it and they said, ‘you really have to’ so I did it and I thought, well, it wasn’t so bad,” he explained. “I mean, my knees were shaking and that, but I kind of liked the idea of explaining something to somebody. I felt as if I was very privileged to understand this so in a way I was a teacher, which is what I always wanted to do since Grade 4 was to teach. And now my classroom is Canada and 35 million students because I try to reach Canadians with information, to educate them but also maybe to entertain them, or to keep those conversations humming. So I see it as I’ve been able to do what I wanted to do as a small child and it’s just not in a classroom.”
“I then began to go more into the answering questions for people and giving talks and seeing the value of boring old climatological data, yesterday’s weather. Who would be interested in and fascinated by yesterday’s weather? Well, I am as a climatologist. And I can turn it into gold. I can use it for people to answer questions about growing crops, safety of roofs or curling rinks, what kind of a design you should use in different places. You don’t build California-style homes in Yorkton because you don’t have the climate.
“I was more what you would call an applied climatologist, one who would use data to answer questions and it kind of sprung from there.”
Although reluctant at first, once in the media’s sights, Phillips took to it like a fish to water. Over the years, he has done thousands of interviews, written hundreds of articles and columns, as well as, a number of best-selling books and received numerous accolades including the Order of Canada in 2001.
In addition he has received the Patterson Medal for Distinguished Service to Meteorology in Canada, two Public Service Merit Awards, honorary doctorates from the University of Waterloo, Nipissing University a Camsell Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Alumni Award of Merit from his alma mater, the University of Windsor.
He is often referred to as Canada’s weather guru and is in high demand as a speaker.
And his accessibleness has never waivered, not even under the media chill journalists experienced during the Stephen Harper years when almost every other civil servant in the country was virtually off-limits unless they had prior, written ministerial permission.
“I feel kind of almost embarrassed by that,” Phillips said. “Nobody ever told me not to do it. I mean, I wouldn’t fill out the forms. I said, ‘My God, I’d be spending half my time filling out forms if I did every time the media contacted me’.”
The government had nothing to fear, however, from giving Phillips free reign with reporters.
“I don’t talk about policy,” he explained. “I talk a lot about climate change, but I stick strictly with the facts, the science of it, and what’s happening out your window. You can’t argue with the numbers. How cold has it been? How cold was it in the 50s and the 60s, the 70s? Are you getting more snow now compared to then? So I kind of stay with that and I don’t editorialize, I don’t poke fingers.
“My motivation is to try to share the information that I have and it’s like as if you’re speaking to your neighbours, your grandchildren, to make it understood. I don’t speak in terms of like “vorticity invection” and this and that. People don’t understand that kind of stuff. I try and understand, well, what does it mean to people. I mean, I just want to know whether I should carry an umbrella to go to work tomorrow or what are the next two weeks going to be like because I’m planning some activity around the farm. I try to just give them the goods.
“I’m kind of a story guy. I’m more of a storyteller than anything else. I go to scientific conferences. I give talks there, I try to be learned, but really love stories. I have 33,000 weather stories in my collection. When I went to Moose Jaw at the beginning of December, all I told was Moose Jaw weather stories. I didn’t tell Toronto weather stories. People want to hear about their own misery and so I kind of use it as a way of reaching people.
“I sometimes think I’m like the old snake oil salesmen. You know, they come into town and they do that song and dance, whip people up to a frenzy and then they sell them the bill of goods. Whenever I give a talk to local groups, or trade groups, it doesn’t matter, I think we’re all the same, they could be a group of Ph.D.s from MIT or just rural people who want to know what next week’s weather is going to be. They all have the same kind of fascination or interest and they all want to be entertained and I try to entertain them, but then I soften them up to give them the bill of goods at the end, which may be something to save their life in terms of severe weather or it may just be something about the climate that might say, ‘you know what, we think the climate is changing and this is the direction it’s going to go. We’re not sure about it, there’s a lot of uncertainty about it, but what can we do about it?
When it comes to climate change Phillips is a bit of a pragmatist.
“Fossil fuels are still going to be the fuel of the future,” he said. “You can’t use renewables to power cities like Regina and Saskatoon and Toronto, so hey, we’ve got to be realistic about this and I preach a lot of adaption. I say, we’ve got to do things differently and that’s why I like rural people. People think rural people do what their grandparents did or their parents did. No, farmers are successful on the prairies because they’re willing to try things. They’re willing to take risks. They’re willing to embrace science and technology, do things differently. That’s why they’re able to do more with resources that seem to be dwindling, I mean, soil and water and what have you, and the weather and because they’re willing to try things.”
Phillips may well know more about Canadian weather than anybody, but when it comes right down to it, he is just like the rest of us, he likes talking about the weather.
“The subject is interesting to me,” he said. “I know it’s interesting to Canadians. I do have a passion and that is really to me what defines me is that after all these years, and I’m 71 years old, I still have this passion for weather and what it does and what it means to us. It’s not as if it’s just we’re boring because we talk about the weather. It means a lot to us, our lives, our livelihood. It’s a source of conversations for us and so what my motivation is is to reach Canadians, to give them that ammunition so they can talk about the whether whether it be at a Tim Hortons or Canadian Tire store, or the Coop store, where they can share a line about the weather.
“I’m glad we’re Canadians talking about the weather. You can’t control it. You can’t do anything about it, but in a way it does prepare us for it. I’ve often been shocked by how few Canadians die from the weather, even the kind of severe extreme weather that we have, but I think one of the reasons is because we talk about it so much and we have a respect for severe weather that we seem to be more conditioned or more experienced at it than other people and I think that’s maybe why we seem to have more people dying falling out of bed than die from weather.”
Dave Phillips is definitely Canada’s weatherman, but by extension, he is Yorkton’s weatherman too because he always has time for any community that wants him.
