Dr. Jerry Toupin loves winter! It is his favourite season. He is an expert in earth sciences and has been exploring the subject for 25 years. His obsession has generated some wonderful and fascinating thoughts, weird facts and great stories of our enduring cold: • In Ontario, a tradition is to drive an old car out onto a lake and take bets on when the ice will break and it sinks • The city of Montréal budgeted $155 million for snow removal in 2015 • Groundhog weather forecasters are right only about 35 percent of the time • Newspapers tend to be negative in reporting about winter, which gives people negative perceptions about winter • Winter sports include not just hockey and curling, but snowshoeing, sledding, skating, skiing, snowboarding, ice yachting, ice fishing, bobsleigh, Crashed Ice, dogsled racing and many more • Children and people who live in rural areas spend more time outside in the wintertime and enjoy the season more • Winter is exhibited in many aspects of Canadian life: currency, stamps, place names, family names, license plates and our passport • Many communities across the country celebrate winter with festivals such as the Royal Winter Fair in Montréal, Québec; Ice on Whyte in Edmonton, Alberta; Québec Winter Carnival in Québec City; Ottawa’s Winterlude on the Rideau Canal and many more • Hockey is our national sport, but are we really the best in the world as we think? Find out here! Including maps, graphs and charts, this is an authoritative look at the truth about winter

from a Canadian perspective!

Dr. Jerry Toupin has travelled around North America and Europe. He has lived in various cities across Canada and taught at universities across the country, including 25 years in the department of Earth Sciences at the University of Alberta. Passionate about the concept of winter, he published 45 articles and 10 books while at the U of A, and he worked for Environment Canada, for departments in the Federal Government and for private companies doing fascinating research on the topic of winter, and he has included the results of his research in this book.

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