Toronto's snow day is bad but at least the city didn't have to call in the army

On Thursday, Torontonians woke to a blanket of snow over the city with more coming down. Closures in the Greater Toronto Area included schools, universities, the Toronto Zoo and even the Don Valley Parkway, after black ice accumulated on the road. TTC routes and the airport were affected as Environment Canada issued a yellow alert, then upgraded it to orange.

But at least the city didn’t have to call in the army.

The memory of that day will remain as long as there are seasons. (Even if Toronto tries to forget, the rest of the country won’t.) It was almost exactly 27 years ago — Jan. 14, 1999 — and Toronto had just been hit with a walloping 41 centimetres of snow.

On this day in weather history, Toronto mayor Mel Lastman called in the Canadian Armed Forces to help with snow removal. https://t.co/q6vLiqmESb

— The Weather Network (@weathernetwork) January 14, 2026

The blizzard of ’99 reached across the entire Quebec-City-to-Windsor corridor and down into the U.S., with Chicago getting more than 50 cm of the white stuff, and South Haven, Mich., more than 70.

Only Toronto, however, took the unprecedented step of bringing in troops to shovel it.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the blizzard that Toronto was dealing with. A record 118 cm of snow had fallen there in the first two weeks of January. And so on Jan. 13, Mayor Mel Lastman phoned federal defence minister Art Eggleton (himself a former Toronto mayor) to ask for help. More than 300 local reservists answered the call, as did 438 troops dispatched from Petawawa, Ont.

“Look, you don’t know how much snow there was,” Lastman told National Post in 2019 on the 20th anniversary of the event. “I took a drive with my driver through the residential streets in downtown Toronto. You couldn’t get an ambulance down there. You couldn’t get a fire truck through there. They were saying on the radio there was going to be another 50 cm of snow or something.”

He added that it wasn’t even his idea.

“It wasn’t me who came up with it,” he said. “It was my wife. When I told her what the heck was going on, she said, ‘Call in the army!’ I would have been kicking myself in the ass if I hadn’t.”

Eggleton noted: “The military — the reserve military, particularly — had been called out on many emergency circumstances right across the country: floods, ice storms, forest fires. It’s not uncommon for the military to be brought in to support and supplement what the first responders and local citizens are doing.”

Be that as it may, the rest of Canada had a field day with scenes of soldiers shovelling sidewalks and steering armoured personnel carriers through downtown intersections. One clip showed Lastman himself riding in what looked like a tank. A second blizzard — of snark — fell on the city.

“Mayor Mel dials 911,” jeered a headline in Vancouver’s The Province.

“Toronto crippled — again — by snow,” sneered another in The Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

Jan 14, 1998: Toronto Mayor, Mel Lastman, called in the Army to assist the city after a major snow storm paralysed the community pic.twitter.com/rI70r5dLuo

— Toronto History (@torontohistory) January 14, 2026

It was front-page news in the Ottawa Citizen, which wrote: “Embarrassed Toronto struggles while rest of country hides a smile.”

Prince Edward Island, an entire province with a population less than a tenth of Toronto’s, offered to help.

“I saw on CTV just the extent of the snow that Toronto had received in five or six days,” Mike Currie, P.E.I. Minister of Transportation at the time, recalled. “I had discussions with some staff here, and by the evening I contacted Toronto and said, ‘If you want, we’ll put together a team.’ They said, ‘Please, because we don’t have anything.'”

His team chartered a bus, crossed the recently opened Confederation Bridge, drove through the night and arrived in Toronto the next day, ready to pitch in. They stayed for two weeks, and Torontonians applauded the help.

“It was a great gift for P.E.I.,” said Currie. “For many years to come, a lot of people from Toronto and Ontario patronized our tourism industry, our seafood industry. We benefitted from it for a long time after, and still do.”

He added: “I felt bad for them, because a lot of people were making fun of Toronto. I just didn’t think it was the right thing to do at the time.”

Maybe not, but it continues. Lastman, who died in 2021, told National Post in 2019: “I was in a taxi the other day. The taxi driver says, ‘I came the year you brought in the army!’ It was really funny. It happens to me all the time now.”

• An oral history of the time Toronto called in the army to deal with the snow
• This town hit -55.7 C — Canada's coldest temperature in 50 years

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