Montrealers ready to skate but may have to wait for rinks to be ready

With temperatures dropping early this year, Montrealers are looking for rinks to skate on, but few of them are open.

With the late arrival of winter in recent years, you might say the skating season was on thin ice.

“It’s sad if there is a shortage of ice rinks because it’s one of the beautiful ways to profit off winter,” ice hockey skater Pierre Delorme said.

With wind chill values dipping to the minus 20s, the cold has come earlier this year.

Montrealers are eager to hit the ice, but rinks like the one at Girouard Park are few and far between. Out of the 230 municipal skating rinks, fewer than two dozen were open in the city as of Sunday.

“A lot of the parks are rendered, you know, unusable by the kids because it’s not safe. They’re icy like they can’t really climb. And so, you know, we live in a cold climate. You have to have something to do outside,” mother Cassandra Andress said.

In a statement to CTV, the city of Montreal said outdoor ice rinks are especially sensitive to weather. Once the ground is saturated, temperatures must stay between -4 C and -20 C for at least three consecutive days for the rink ice to form.

Meanwhile, many are turning to Dorval, where a refrigerated covered outdoor rink opened for its 2025-2026 season last month. The staff says they’re seeing crowds from across Canada and the U.S.

“I’m here with the fam jam. [...] We’re just glad that they have taken an initiative to open up these rinks,” father Karam Alhamdani said after travelling from Lachine.

“If I go to another rink, it’s I have to go and shovel it,” ice hockey skater Matthew Takenaka said.

“If it dips below zero, like you can always come here. It’s open,” Takenaka told CTV News.

In light of climate change, the mayor of Dorval says there are advantages to a covered refrigerated rink.

“We’re getting snow when the last few years we haven’t had cold weather or snow. So very hard to maintain a natural ice rink on grass or on asphalt,” Marc Doret said.

“A refrigerated rink outdoors is fantastic and we can start anywhere from four to six weeks earlier than we can for a regular, you know, backyard, hockey rink,” he added.

Still, the city of Montreal hopes to open all skating rinks in the Ville-Marie borough before the holidays if the weather cooperates.