Matt Hazard

Ask a Canadian, “What’s the winter like up there?” and they’ll probably respond with something like “If Hell froze over, it wouldn’t be as bad as this.”

For perspective, it’s not uncommon for parts of Canada to be measurably colder than the surface of Mars. Unfortunately for me, I live in one of those parts. And for the record, I live in southern Canada, close to the US border, not way up in the north.

Where I’m from, a typical Canadian winter during a cold snap can drop down to -30C temperatures. Now add a little wind to that, and your body heat will be dipping faster than the babysitter’s boyfriend when the car pulls up.

The Windchill – or the factor that decides what sort of frozen hell you’d walk out into – has been a debate for a while now on what exactly it means. It used to be a nonintuitive scaled numbering index ranging from 1200 to 3000ish. It didn’t really give any more information, only implying that if the number was higher, the colder the wind made it feel. Yeah, we didn’t get it either.

Somewhere down the line, the system was changed to say “feels like” and then give a temperature in Celsius. So now on a cold windy winter day, we have a system that can show a core temperature of -15C, followed by a windchill factor that “feels like -29C”. This at least now quantifies the windchill into something that makes sense.

Seems good, right? Maybe. Except now it’s impossible to get a straight answer out of anyone as to what the actual temperature is. And my mother is the absolute worst for this.

“Careful outside today, it’s -50!”

“No mom, I promise you that it’s not -50C outside. That’s almost impossible here.”

“No, no, I heard the weatherman say…”

“MOM. STOP. The outdoor thermometer reads -25, that’s the temperature.”

“Just dress for -50.”

“…”

The above example works best if you put the voice of Lois Griffin to my mom’s narrative. I’ve tried countless times to explain to her that just like plunging into cold water, the windchill is just a measurement of how fast you drop down to the actual temperature, NOT the actual temperature. If it’s -25C outside with a windchill of -40C, you would freeze at the same rate as if it were -40C. But you would only ever get as cold as -25C. Otherwise the temperature would be -40C and there would be no need for a windchill..

You’d think this would be it. All the arguing would stop after winter, right? Hold on, this is Canada in the prairies. Can’t let an opportunity slide by for a good old debate.

We have a humidex, too. Which means every summer, if the humidity is high, a warm 28C day could feel like +37C with the humidex. I’ll let you guess which my mother would say the outdoor temperature is when she ultimately tells me.

What does put a little warmth in my frost-bitten heart is that her and I still have these ongoing conversations. At the end of the day, my mom is just looking out for her son the only way she knows how – by arguing her point they way she sees it to keep me safe from the elements.

I could probably ease up just a bit and stop trying to point out the science of thermodynamics, because she’s not interested in that. She just wants me to be comfortable out there. Maybe next time, I won’t have that benign debate with her (even though I really enjoy it), and just gauge the temperature the way I ultimately do anyway – by going outside and taking a deep breath. If I start coughing and my nostrils freeze, I’ll opt to stay inside.