Bus cancellations and school closures in Canada
Editorial Team · November 5, 2026
Why a cancelled bus and an open school are different decisions, and which consortia this site has actually checked.
The question on a winter morning is often two questions. Will the school be open? Will the bus run? In much of Canada those answers come from different organizations. This guide explains the split where we have checked it, and it stops where we have not.
Two scores, because the decisions are two
CanadaSnowDay prints a closure score and a bus score. The methodology uses different snow tables for each. Bus points rise at smaller amounts than closure points. The reason is operational, not decorative: a board can keep a building open for students who walk or are driven, while the transportation operator cancels routes that are not safe to drive. The Ontario page states that pattern for Ontario. We do not claim the same administrative split, with a consortium between the board and the bus, for every province. We have not checked that structure nationwide.
The live title on a board page quotes the closure verdict the gauge is showing, such as "School is probably on". It does not say the buses are running. Read the bus line under the gauge before you decide whether a child who rides is affected.
Ontario consortia we have opened
Ontario boards decide school closures. Transportation is often a consortium. The province's finder is Find a school board or school authority. School Bus Ontario publishes a directory if you do not know which consortium covers an address.
These are the pairings recorded on this site, each from the organization's own pages as checked when the board page was written:
STOPR's about page, as we recorded it on the Peel board page, describes service for students residing in Peel Region. It also says STOPR administers each board's transportation policies. A Dufferin address is not automatically that description. The Dufferin-Peel page says to confirm the address on the board site.
TSTG describes itself as an initiative of the two Toronto boards. That sentence is theirs. We repeat it only because their site says it, and we link the site so you can read the current wording.
We do not copy fleet sizes, route counts, or a promised announcement clock. Those details change, and a guide that freezes them would be wrong next winter. Each board page on this site says to read the consortium in the morning.
What a cancelled bus does not mean
A bus cancellation does not, by itself, close the school. Families who walk, drive, or take municipal transit still need the school's own status. In Toronto that split is concrete: yellow buses are TSTG, and many secondary students use the TTC. The TDSB page says a yellow-bus cancellation is not a TTC shutdown. The same logic applies wherever the ride and the building are different systems. We will not list every municipal transit agency. If your child does not ride a yellow bus, the consortium notice is the wrong document.
The reverse is also true. An open school does not mean every route ran. Rural and suburban preloads on this site add bus points for that reason. The methodology adds 12 bus points for a rural setting and 4 for suburban, and it subtracts 3 bus points for urban. Those are our weights. They are not a consortium rule. A city page that says "our model preload" is labelling that choice.
Outside Ontario, we stop at what we checked
Newfoundland and Labrador links NLSchools and the Department of Education. We do not describe a separate bus consortium there, because we have not published one we checked. St. John's and Labrador City are weather pages. They do not claim to be the transportation operator.
Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut have forecast points and no board pages. The province hubs say why: we have not checked a territorial closure page to the standard used for the Ontario boards. Until that check exists, there is no link and no invented posting time.
Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island have city forecasts on this site. They do not all have board pages. Absence of a board page means we have not checked that authority for this guide. It does not mean the schools never close, and it does not mean the buses and the schools are always the same decision. If you know the official page, the contact form is how a correction starts. We add a link after we open it.
The point tables are different on purpose
The methodology publishes two snow tables. Closure points stay at 0 for 0 cm, then step through 2, 5, 10, 15, 25, and 40 cm. Bus points step through 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, and 30 cm, and they are higher at the small end. A 6 cm morning can already sit in a high bus band while the closure band is still lower. That is the numeric version of "the bus stopped and the building stayed open." It is our scale. A consortium can do the opposite of the scale on any given morning. The scale does not bind them.
Setting weights sit on top of those tables. Rural adds 5 closure points and 12 bus points. Suburban adds 4 bus points. Urban subtracts 3 bus points. Elementary adds 4 closure points and 6 bus points. Secondary subtracts 2 closure points. Unspecified adds nothing. Those integers are the methodology page. A family that leaves school type and setting on the defaults gets the unspecified and the city's saved setting, which the city page names as a preload.
Wind does not get those bus points by itself. The methodology adds wind only when snow or ice is already in the 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. window. A windy, bare morning is not scored as drifting snow. Freezing rain is its own line, with hourly points and a cap, again as written on that page. Read the factor that actually moved the bus number before you treat the percentage as "snow."
How to read the predictor on a bus morning
Look at the bus percentage, not only the closure percentage. Look at the wind and freezing-rain lines if the snowfall is small. A dry, very cold January, such as the ERA5 January mean of −24.4°C at Iqaluit or −23.2°C at Yellowknife, is a cold factor. It is not automatically a bus cancellation. The hourly forecast, not the ten-year average, feeds the score. The average is on the city page so you can see what a normal year at that point looks like (Open-Meteo).
Then leave this site. Open the consortium if the table above names one. Open the school if it does not. The disclaimer is the short version: the score is not an instruction to travel or to stay home.
Editorial Team. The Editorial Team writes and maintains this site. We document the predictor, check school-board and transportation links against the organizations' own websites, and correct pages when those sites change. We are not a school board, a transportation consortium, or a government office.