How school snow days are decided in Canada

A snow day in Canada is not a national announcement. Education is a provincial responsibility under section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which assigns the legislatures of the provinces to make laws in relation to education. The official consolidation is on the Justice Laws site (Constitution Act, 1867). There is no federal office that closes schools for snow. This guide says who does decide, what this site has actually checked, and what we will not pretend to know.

There is no single Canadian switch

Because education is provincial, a closure practice that is normal in one province is not a rule for the next. This website does not keep a territorial or provincial policy we have not read on that government's site. Where we have checked a page, we link it. Where we have not, the city page says so.

The score on CanadaSnowDay is a weather estimate. It does not close a school. The methodology page publishes the formula. The disclaimer says the same thing in shorter form: the organization that decides is the one named on its own website.

Ontario splits the school and the bus

Ontario is the province we have documented most carefully, because the public record separates the two decisions.

The province tells families to find their board on its own finder, Find a school board or school authority. School boards decide whether their schools are open. Student transportation is often run by a consortium the boards form together. School Bus Ontario publishes a directory of those consortia. A cancelled bus and an open school is a normal Ontario winter morning. It is not a contradiction, and it is not something a single percentage can describe. That is why this site prints two scores. The reason is written on the Ontario page and in the methodology.

We have checked these pairings and linked them from the board pages:

• The Toronto District School Board points bus families to the Toronto Student Transportation Group, which describes itself as an initiative of the TDSB and the Toronto Catholic District School Board. The TCDSB page on this site says the same office. Many Toronto secondary students use the TTC. A yellow-bus cancellation is not a TTC shutdown. We do not publish a TSTG fleet statistic, because those figures change and they are not ours.
• The Peel District School Board and the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board are the boards named with Student Transportation of Peel Region. STOPR's own description, as recorded on our Peel page, limits that description to students residing in Peel Region. Dufferin addresses should not assume the same consortium without checking the board.
• The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board directs transportation notices to Ottawa Student Transportation Authority.
• The Thames Valley District School Board uses mybigyellowbus.ca.
• The Simcoe County District School Board uses Simcoe County Student Transportation Consortium.
• The Waterloo Region District School Board uses Student Transportation Services of Waterloo Region.
• The Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board uses Hamilton-Wentworth Student Transportation Services.
• The Upper Grand District School Board uses Wellington-Dufferin Student Transportation Services.

We do not print a clock time for any of them. Several consortium sites describe when they aim to post. Practices change. The only reliable copy is the site itself on the morning you need it. Our board pages say that on purpose.

City pages that share a board are linked from that board's citySlugs list. Toronto is on the TDSB and TCDSB pages. Ottawa is on the OCDSB page. If a city page says we do not have a checked board page, that is the fact. We do not guess the authority from the postal code.

Other provinces on this site

We do not describe a hidden national pattern and then apply it to Quebec, the Prairies, or British Columbia. Where a province page names an authority, it is because we linked a page we opened.

Newfoundland and Labrador links NLSchools and the Department of Education. St. John's and Labrador City have separate forecast points because the snowfall record at those coordinates is not the same. The provincial hub is not a Labrador forecast.

For Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, this site does not publish a school-board page. We have not checked a territorial closure rule to the standard used for the Ontario boards above, so we do not invent a link or a posting time. The city pages for Whitehorse, Yellowknife, and Iqaluit are weather estimates at those forecast points.

What to do the night before and the morning of

The night before, read the two scores and the factor lines: snowfall, timing, temperature and wind chill, freezing rain, and wind. The methodology defines the window as 7 p.m. the evening before through 8 a.m. The live title on a city or board page repeats the same verdict sentence as the gauge. If the forecast did not load, the title does not invent a status.

The morning of, open the board or consortium site named for your school. If this website has no such page, open the school's own site. A high score can be followed by an open school. A low score can be followed by a cancelled bus. Both have happened often enough that the disclaimer says so without pretending we counted them.

A morning checklist that stays inside the sources

Start with the place. If the city has a page, open it: Toronto, Ottawa, or St. John's are examples, not a complete list. The gauge and the browser title use the same verdict sentence. Read the bus percentage separately. Read which factor is largest. Snow, freezing rain, wind, cold, and timing are the lines the methodology defines. If the largest line is freezing rain, a snowfall average from 2014–2023 will not explain the morning. If the largest line is cold, the January mean on the city page is context and the hourly wind chill is the score.

Then open one official site. In Ontario that is the board and, when the table in the bus guide names one, the consortium. Elsewhere it is the authority linked from the province page, or the school's own site when we have not checked an authority. Environment and Climate Change Canada is the public forecast if you want a warning rather than our editorial points.

Do this in that order even when the percentage is high. The cap of 97 exists so the page cannot read as a certainty. The disclaimer says a high score can still be followed by an open school. We have not counted how often. We are not going to estimate it here.

What this guide will not say

We will not say that every province uses a consortium. We have checked that structure for the Ontario boards listed above, not for the whole country. We will not give an announcement hour. We will not convert a snowfall average into a closure rule. Those averages, where a city page shows them, are Open-Meteo ERA5 for 2014–2023 at the forecast point (Open-Meteo). They are not Environment and Climate Change Canada station normals, and they are not board policy.

If a link on this page is wrong, the contact page explains what a correction needs: the sentence and the current official URL. We change a page after we check that address, not because a message asserted it.