WEATHERING HEIGHTS
Environment Canada’s Dave Phillips going strong 190 seasons into career.
Dave Phillips, the most interviewed public servant in Canada, has been asked to do strange and unsettling things in the name of news. To sit in a tree. To have frozen fish dropped on his head. To wave his hand spookily over a glass orb as if it were a crystal ball.
His phone starts ringing at 10:30 in the morning, after news editors have taken stock of the day’s happenings and handed out the assignment as underrated as it is scorned: the weather story.
By the time he takes the first call, Phillips has been awake for 61⁄2 hours. He has spent 90 minutes running numbers in his head on the Barrie-Toronto GO train, trying to come up with catchy observations and nuggets of intrigue.
At 7 a.m. he arrives with his scribbled notes at the concrete monolith that is the Ontario office of Environment Canada, his employer for 48 years.
“Senior climatologist” is his official title, but most people call him a weatherman. He is, in fact, The Weatherman. Phillips, 71, is the go-to guy for journalists reporting on weather trends. He answers more than 500 media calls each year. He is an expert communicator with no PR training. He is a government scientist who was able to speak freely to reporters during the Harper era.
There is no one more quoted on Canadian weather, and no one more quotable.
“We think we’re owed spring,” Phillips will say when chilling temperatures linger into April, “but we’re not owed spring this year because we didn’t get winter — there’s been no suffering.”
Or, “Warm? It’s been record warm! You’ve never seen anything like this. Even your grandparents have never seen anything like this.”
Once, when he offhandedly uttered the words “storm porn” in a pre-interview, a TV reporter built a whole segment around the phrase, because there is only one thing editors and the public crave more than a weather story or a sex story, and that is a sexy weather story.
“If you want to participate with the media, one thing you can’t be is dull, and Dave is not dull,” says his friend and longtime colleague Phil Chadwick. “And you want to also have something to say, and Dave has always had something to say.”
A search for his name in the Canadian news database Infomart returns 14,175 hits. He doesn’t own a cellphone but is generous with his home number — much to the dismay of his wife, who has been woken up by late-night phone calls from reporters.
As a climatologist, Phillips studies weather patterns over time and what causes them. But more than that, he is a climate historian who has collected 35,000 weather stories, which he keeps recorded in file folders in his office even though most of them are in his head.
His work has earned him an Order of Canada appointment. CBC News anchor Peter Mansbridge has dubbed him “Canada’s senior statesman on climate watching.” He delivers 50 speeches annually to groups you probably didn’t know existed, from the Ontario Federation of Snowmobile Clubs to the North American Strawberry Growers Association. He created the bestselling Canadian Weather Trivia Calendar, which he jokes has made more money for the government than he is paid in salary. His bosses say he is irreplaceable.
“My job isn’t to manage David Phillips,” says Kent Johnson, one of his supervisors. “It’s just to make him happy so he doesn’t retire, because he’s so valuable to us as an employee. That is a skill set that we know we can’t replace.”
“He holds the Order of Canada for God’s sake,” Johnson adds. “Who am I to tell him what to do?”
Phillips has a good rapport with journalists, but the media can be a fickle friend, often desperate for help yet suspicious of those who eagerly provide it. Shortly after agreeing to an interview for this profile, Phillips expressed second thoughts about a story focused on him. The insecurity surfaced after two reporters in the same day called him a media slut — playfully, but he seemed genuinely glum about it.
“Maybe you want to reconsider doing a story on me,” he wrote in an email. “I’m really not an interesting guy (it’s the weather that’s interesting) . . . I sometimes think that I am overexposed.”
Months later, he is mostly over it. “I truly just do what my job is, which is to answer requests from the media among other things,” he says. “Some people think I’m overexposed and that’s fine, and maybe I am. But I don’t seek it out.”
Phillips hasn’t made a penny off his calendar or speaking gigs. TV networks have tried to poach him, offering more money and exposure, but he has declined. They want him to “do the weather,” but he is not a forecaster and will not pretend to be one.
“If it’s weather out your window, it’s far better to speak to somebody else,” he says. “But if it’s weather that happened last month, or you’re interested in what this summer was like, or what the winter ahead is going to be like, then that’s kind of my bailiwick.”
The story of how Dave Phillips became Dave Phillips is a tale of lucky timing, a disastrous teaching experience and a study that angered Newfoundlanders.
Tracking Hurricane Dave Born in Windsor, Ont., on a rather hohum weather day in the thunderstorm capital of Canada, Phillips was the second of four children. His father worked in construction, but Phillips didn’t know him very well. His mother raised the kids on her own, taking various jobs until she returned to school to become a teacher.
Phillips studied geography at the University of Windsor, where he met his future wife, Darlene, in a geology class in the mid-1960s. While writing a paper in his graduating year on the legendary geographer Kenneth Hare, Phillips learned that an Environment Canada official from Toronto who had been Hare’s student was coming to Windsor to hire meteorologists. Phillips wasn’t qualified for the job, but he put his name forward for an interview so he could talk to the official about Hare.
“It was a little underhanded for me to get the interview, but as it turned out, my God, I’m here 48 years later,” he says.
Phillips was honest about his motives and apologized to the official for being tricky. They had a good chat, Phillips wrote his paper and that was that — or so he thought.
In the meantime, Phillips tried teaching high school, which had been his dream since he was a child. But he turned out to be bad at maintaining order in the classroom. The kids sensed his weakness and put tacks on his chair. Phillips didn’t react when he sat on them. “I wasn’t going to give in,” he says.
As he was mulling over whether to shift gears, Environment Canada called him back about a job in the Toronto weather office. He decided to give it a try.
Phillips moved to Toronto, where he started his career and family. He and his wife had two girls, Kelley and Jennifer, who, after visiting their father’s office and seeing the giant computers and weather instruments, came to believe he was involved in the making of the Star Wars films. They visited a cottage in Port Elgin each summer. One year, Phillips made the news after he mentioned to a reporter that it had rained the whole week during their August vacation. “We are no different than anybody else, but people seem to think we have a guaranteed good week of weather when we take a holiday,” he told the Sunday Sun.
In 1984, Phillips was assigned a Treasury Board project to modify the qualifications for hardship pay, which federal employees receive in certain areas to make up for harsh climate conditions. The study got buried, but later made national news after it was uncovered by a newspaper reporter. The low rating awarded to St. John’s, N.L., prompted then Tory cabinet minister John Crosbie to complain about the report in the House of Commons. All of a sudden Phillips was defending the research on the national news, and getting a charge out of it.
As it became clear Phillips was an adept communicator, he turned into Environment Canada’s go-to guy for media interviews. Over time, it evolved into his primary role.
His profile increased in the 1990s after he became the Weather Network’s “Ask the Expert,” filming 90-second trivia bits answering questions such as “Why is snow white?” or “How do hurricanes get their names?”
Now he’s recognized wherever he goes. Once, taking the subway to a play with his daughter and grandchildren during a snowstorm, fellow travellers teased him for having the nerve to show his face in public on such a terrible weather day. His grandson, Tucker, was intrigued by the attention. “Grandpa D sure has a lot of friends,” he said.
Fish ’n’ clips and other requests The strangest request Phillips has ever received came during an interview for a TVO special on Black Creek Pioneer Village in December 1996.
“It was one of these things where I had 30 minutes to talk about weather history,” he recalls. “Our ancestors, the kind of weather they had to deal with, you see. And so we walked around the village. It was almost like I was back to the 1850s. And so they would ask me questions about, well, how did they get forecasts back then? Or what were the storms like?”
Phillips was in his glory. Normally he’d be lucky to get 30 seconds to impart a message both interesting and educational. Thirty minutes was a boon. They strolled around the village as Phillips regaled the producers with stories.
“Then they said, ‘We’re going to drop frozen fish on you.’ ” What? “They went to the fish market in Toronto and got fish, frozen fish.”
Phillips, white-haired, blue-eyed and bespectacled, is telling this story in his fourth-floor office on an unseasonably warm November day, which he has declared “an atmospheric gift.” As he speaks, his voice rises and his hands make waves like he’s treading water; he can’t overcome this enthusiastic habit.
Phillips had told the TVO producers one of his favourite tales, which was the time a waterspout — like a tornado on water — picked up fish from the ocean and carried them into the atmosphere where they froze and fell back to Earth.
“So they wanted me to recreate that story, as one of the bizarre things that ancestors had to deal with,” he continues. “They tried to drop them so that they didn’t hit my head. They hit my shoulder or my arm or something like this. And I thought, wow. I kind of liked that moment. That was an odd one but that doesn’t happen too often.”
Silly requests are sometimes part of the shtick, he says. Phillips doesn’t take himself too seriously. He believes you have to entertain before you can inform.
As described by reporters who have interviewed him, Phillips is helpful, enthusiastic, folksy, goofy, trusted, humble, chatty, sometimes too chatty, earnest and, above all, genuine. Also: a sound-bite machine. He doesn’t like that one.
“It makes it sound like you’re trying to come up with a clip to get it over with,” he says, frowning. And while sometimes, yes, he drops a quick one-liner when he knows it’s what a TV reporter needs, that’s generally not how he rolls. He’s happiest when he shares a story or anecdote that will, in his words, “keep conversations humming.”
While some experts fall down the rabbit hole trying to explain obscure concepts to a frantic reporter writing a 400-word story on deadline, Phillips has a keen sense of what reporters want and need, and he takes pride in delivering it. He gives the same time and respect whether the call is from Peter Mansbridge or a journalism student.
When he coaches scientist colleagues on how to give good interviews, he warns them to keep it simple: “Try to understand that this is not a learned audience you’re speaking to,” he says, “so don’t speak about vorticity advection.
“My motivation is to wrestle out of the data a little eye-opener,” Phillips says. A gee-wow-whiz, he sometimes calls it. A detail or anecdote that people will share at the local coffee shop. For example: men are hit by lightning more than women.
“Some of my colleagues probably feel like I’m prostituting the science, and I understand that,” he says. But his motive is to educate Canadians about the weather. “And you can’t do that by yourself. You’ve got to do it through the media.
“No question, I’ve made some mistakes,” he says. “Things that I’m sure not proud of, and I was always hoping that nobody saw the interview, you see.” Which interview? “Well . . .” He hesitates, wincing. The most embarrassing moment of Phillips’s career wasn’t the falling fish. Nor was it the time a TV host invited him on her show after a hard winter to teasingly play an old clip of him wrongly predicting a mild winter, and he happened to be wearing the same shirt in both interviews.
It happened in 1999, when Hurricane Floyd prompted the largest evacuation in U.S. history. Phillips was in studio with CTV’s Lloyd Robertson to record a 90second pretaped interview. The first 85 seconds were perfect.
“Then after we’re finished,” Phillips recalls, “Lloyd says, ‘Thank you, David.’ And I said” — he squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head — “‘You’re welcome, Floyd.’ ”
An understandable mistake, given the circumstances, but Phillips was mortified. They had to reshoot the whole interview, and the second take didn’t go as smoothly because he was thinking Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd.
Robertson praises Phillips for his warmth and enthusiasm. “He was just himself,” the news anchor says. “He was that kind of person on camera and off camera. He was really interested in it, and that resonates on TV.”
He chuckles at the blunder. “Very emphatically, after he finished the second take,” Robertson recalls, “he paused and said, ‘Thank you, Lloyd.’ ”
The man they didn’t muzzle During the Harper era, when scientists were routinely restricted from speaking to the press about their research, reporters could call Phillips and ask him about anything at all.
“Canada’s going to be a warmer country, there’s no question about it,” he said in a January 2014 interview with Mansbridge that aired on national television.
How did he get away with talking about climate change, of all things?
“I think it’s because I try to stick to the science,” he says. “I stay away from the politics and the policy.”
“The other thing, too, is I never told Ottawa when I was asked for an interview. Because we were supposed to say when the interview took place, give a list of the questions, and the answers, who was it, how long was it . . .”
Sometimes he gives 12 interviews a day. Logging that information would have eaten up much of his week. So he didn’t do it. “And they never really asked me,” he says. “They never rapped my knuckles.”
Perhaps it’s because he walked the line without stepping over it, stating facts without casting blame or offering his opinion. Or maybe after 48 years and all his achievements, he’s untouchable.
Phillips acknowledges that colleagues may have felt he didn’t use his platform to take a strong enough stand on climate change. And indeed, his friend Phil Chadwick, who speaks admiringly of Phillips, says: “I wish sometimes he would have been a bit more definitive on climate change, but I totally understood what his circumstances were.”
Phillips strives for balance. The doom-and-gloom perspective of some environmentalists has never sat well with him. “Why would we change if the world’s going to end in 2056?” he says. “I think you’ve got to give people hope. And so what I try to do is to say, you know, it’s not necessarily doom and gloom. It’s not the end.”
“I’m not scary,” he adds. “I may be falsely optimistic.”
More than any other question lately, Phillips is asked when he’s going to call it quits. He was eligible for retirement on a full pension13 years ago. “I’m either really stupid or I love my job,” he says.
He thought he was winding down five years ago when he and his wife sold their house in Aurora and bought a condo in Barrie. But then his bosses suggested he work from home a couple of days a week, which cut the commute into something he could live with.
Phillips isn’t sure what he would do if he retired, aside from spend more time with his grandchildren. He hasn’t cultivated any hobbies. His job and his passion are one and the same.
“I don’t think there’s an hour that goes by that he doesn’t think about the weather,” says his daughter, Kelley Hay. “And that’s bizarre, but that’s his thing.
“I’ll tell him my son has a football game on this date, and I almost see his eyes rolling back and I think, is he searching to find out if there was like a hailstorm on that date back in ’46? I don’t know if he shuts that off.”
His enthusiasm is unmatched. As a young father, Phillips briefly dabbled in community theatre but quit when he found himself becoming annoyed with actors who didn’t get into character before they went onstage. “They’d be talking about something else, and I’d be saying, you know, you’re a drunken sailor, you should be acting like a drunken sailor 30 seconds before you go on there to be a drunken sailor.”
Phillips has spent much of his life baffled about why people don’t get as charged up about things as he does. This goes way back to his brief career as a high school teacher, when the students weren’t interested in hearing what he had to say. “I just felt everybody should be as eager to learn as I was, and it was a rude awakening. I thought, my gosh, aren’t they excited? It’s exciting for me to tell them this.”
Sometimes, Phillips acknowledges, his enthusiasm requires tempering. During a recent shoot for a TVO children’s program, he filmed a bit where he was talking to puppets about the weather. Before they began, the director asked Phillips to be as animated as possible.
After one take, however, the director returned with new instructions. “I’ve never said this to anyone, but can you be less animated?” he said. “You’re upstaging the puppets.”