Montreal’s outdoor skating rinks are in danger as winters keep getting warmer

Phil Pinsky spent hours building a skating rink in his backyard for his three young children. He said it was a backbreaking labour of love, but his hockey and skating-mad kids love coming home from school, strapping on their skates and heading outside to play on the rink.

“They have a blast doing it. As much as my back is screaming at me, the kids love it and it’s so joyful,” said Pinsky, who often hits the ice with his two boys and daughter.

Pinsky first built a rink during the pandemic, and started a side business building backyard rinks, constructing almost 70 in the first year of the pandemic.

Pinsky says normally it’s a challenge to get his kids off the ice. But this winter, with bouts of heavy snow and above-zero warm weather, it has proven a nightmare for his rink.

“It’s all slush everywhere. It’s all slush and just twigs and branches,” he said. “You would not expect to have an end of season in January. We normally have eight or nine weeks of skating. This year, we’ve had one.”

Across the island, outdoor, non-refrigerated rinks have struggled all winter. The seesaw weather has left them unfit for skating, and difficult to maintain.

The city of Westmount has five outdoor rinks, one of them refrigerated. Mayor Christina Smith says the city has had to close its non-refrigerated rinks several times this winter, because of how the cycle of freezing and thawing has wreaked havoc on the rinks. It takes at least four days of work to get the rinks back up and smooth for skating after they’ve closed.

“It essentially wrecks the rinks,” she said. “It takes a lot of work to get them up to speed.”

Smith says the city may consider trying for more outdoor refrigerated rinks in the future.

“It’s been a real challenge and it’s why you are seeing more and more refrigerated rinks pop up throughout the island of Montreal,” she said. “If we really want to have outdoor skating it’s almost like it needs to be a refrigerated rink now if you want to last the whole season.”

This season has been so bad, one of Canada’s most famous outdoor rinks — the Rideau Canal — has yet to even open.

“It’s quite difficult in those conditions to keep an ice rink that can be useable,” said Environment Canada meteorologist André Cantin.

Environment Canada says this is the second warmest winter on record for southern Quebec, since records began in 1875.

“The trend is there. The future winters we will experience over southern Quebec will be warmer than what we used to have in the last century.”

In Montreal, the only reliable place for outdoor skating is at refrigerated rinks. Beaver Lake on Mont Royal is one of the most popular, but even that rink has had to close several times this season because of unseasonably warm weather.

As for backyard rinks, Pinsky says he’s part of a Facebook group of backyard rink supporters with 20,000 members, and everyone is devastated by this season.

“It’s February and I am outside in a sweatshirt. It’s plus 7 degrees today. It’s atrocious,” he said.

Pinsky says with cold weather forecast for this weekend, he will try one more time to get his rink up and running again. After that, he says he’ll put away his shovels, and hope for a better winter next year.