As a hopefully beautiful summer approaches Winnipeg , the citizens realize the dark, cold, windy, snow covered hell frozen over reality  of an impending winter will be here in five months .

Winters in Winnipeg are usually long and dry with occasional blasts of bitterly cold weather from the northwest.  Out of Canada’s 100 largest cities, Winnipeg’s winter is the tenth coldest with an average low of −20.2 °C (−4.4 °F). The snow cover season lasts 132 days; usually from November till March, sometimes earlier or later. From December through February the maximum daily temperature exceeds 0 °C (32 °F), on average, for only 10 days and the minimum daily temperature falls below −20 °C (−4 °F) on 49 days. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Winnipeg was −47.8 °C (−54 °F), on 24 December 1879 and the coldest since then was −45 °C (−49 °F) on 18 February 1966. Within the past twenty years, the temperature has dipped below −40.0 °C (−40 °F) once on 5 February 2007 as well as both 29 and 30 January 2004. On 1 February 1996 the temperature was −41.8 °C (−43.2 °F) however, the wind chill was -57.1, making this the coldest windchill in the city’s history.

But let us think ahead. If the funding and technology could coalesce, what about a dome, or domes for the city?  That way the citizens could sit outside on their decks, mow the lawn and never have to plug in the car year round. The city’s snow removal budget would be non-existent, that extra revenue could be applied to the dome payments. Outdoor swimming pools could stay open all the time, drive-in restaurants could sell ice cream for 12 months and cyclists could inflame the tempers of drivers all bloody year!  It would be sensational!

If the city, provincial and federal governments could each provide 10 billion dollars, and the elite prosperous entrepreneurs combined with the business oligarchs of Winnipeg provide another 10 billion, voila, the project rockets skyward. Lets do it!

Downtown Winnipeg in January

Notice a second dome in the background protecting St. Boniface

The Osborne Village area during a polar vortex in February

Sensational! Go canoeing on the Assiniboine River while a Siberian Polar Front invades western Canada, and Edmontonians are freezing their backsides, ha!

The Golden Boy atop the Legislative building would not have to endure blistering ice pellets that rain down from the frozen ionosphere.

What seems like unattainable dreams can come true, we just have to believe and stay with the dream.  Persist, never say die! The dream also needs a gold mine to be discovered underneath downtown Winnipeg.