A powerful winter storm continued to paralyze roads across Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area Thursday morning, grounding flights, closing highways and triggering dozens of crashes as heavy snow conditions made roads treacherous.

What started as a yellow warning snowstorm has worked its way up to an orange warning snowstorm with more than 20 to 30 centimetres of snow, and up to 5o cm in some regions.

The storm also forced widespread school and university closures across much of Ontario, as boards and post-secondary institutions cancelled in-person classes due to dangerous travel conditions.

Global News chief meteorologist Anthony Farnell said the system is the most significant winter storm to hit the region since January 2022.

Across the GTA, OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt said officers were responding to about a dozen active crashes Thursday morning, most involving single vehicles sliding off the roadway.

“Most are single-vehicle crashes, cars in the ditch, into guardrails, facing the wrong way after losing control,” Schmidt said in a social media post. “We’ve also had a couple of multi-vehicle crashes.”

In Toronto, the Don Valley Parkway has been closed in both directions following several crashes linked to black ice.

Police say major routes across the city are seeing snow-covered and slippery conditions.

Schmidt urged drivers to slow down and give snowplows room to work, warning that travel would remain slow and hazardous.

“Make sure you’re giving yourself all the time in the world. Let the plows do their work,” he said. “Have a full headlighting system on.”

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According to Toronto city officials, some TTC routes are also facing delays or experiencing suspended service till conditions and roads improve.

TTC has announced that they are taking measures to ensure service continuity including running anti-icing trains to keep the power rail and tracks clear of snow and ice.

The storm has also caused significant disruption at Toronto Pearson International Airport.

According to FlightAware, as of Thursday, 165 flights were delayed and 101 were cancelled at Pearson.  49 delays involved flights travelling within, into or out of the United States from Toronto Pearson.

Several major GTA highways and ramps are also feeling the impacts of this powerful weather storm, with many partially or fully closed due to crashes and stranded vehicles.

According to OPP, a jack-knifed tractor-trailer shut down the westbound Highway 401 collector ramp at Kennedy Road in Scarborough early Thursday morning.

Other transport trucks have also been reported to be involved in collisions on Highway 402 and along stretches of Highway 401.

In London, fire crews responded to a crash on Highway 401 eastbound just before 4 a.m., using ropes to reach a transport truck driver who had gone down a steep, snow-covered ditch.

No injuries were reported, though heavy towing equipment will be required to remove the vehicle.

OPP’s West Region also reported multiple highway closures due to vehicle collisions Thursday morning.

In central Ontario, police warned that snow, ice and poor visibility were affecting roads in Barrie, Orillia, Midland, Bracebridge, Collingwood, Peterborough and Northumberland County.

OPP are urging drivers in those regions to avoid non-essential travel and to prepare emergency supplies if travel is unavoidable.

“Wait for the storm to pass if you can,” Schmidt said. “Plows are out clearing the roads, but it’s going to be a slow, slippery and messy drive.”

Police are also warning motorists to practise safe driving rules after a transport truck was spotted stopped in a live lane to clear windshield wipers.

OPP called this move “extremely dangerous” and are urging drivers to exit the highway or pull into a safe location if they need to stop.

Ottawa also reported early-morning disruptions after being moved from a yellow to an orange warning. City traffic officials confirmed that at least nine collisions had occurred by mid-morning Thursday as conditions deteriorated.

Conditions are expected to improve slightly by noon, when snowfall will stop.

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The Ford government is delaying its own affordable housing measures in several major Ontario cities, calling the rules it wrote “unnecessary red tape and requirements” that make it more expensive to build.

The pause will affect inclusionary zoning rules in Toronto, Kitchener and Mississauga, a policy that requires developers to provide a minimum number of affordable housing units in certain situations.

Legislation introduced by the government in May 2025 said municipalities could mandate new projects near transit stations to include five per cent affordable units for a maximum of 25 years after their construction.

It was a provincial compromise that Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said came nowhere near what she had hoped she could ask for from developers, but which she grudgingly accepted in a meeting with Premier Doug Ford.

“I went in and said, ‘Give us 20 per cent.’ In fact, I appealed for 30 per cent. I said to the premier, ‘We need to build housing — not all of it, but 20, 30 per cent people can afford. It’s a perfect opportunity,’” Chow said at a news conference on Tuesday.

“He said no and now it’s five per cent. I had no choice, I said, ‘OK, five per cent, all right. At least it’s five per cent.’”

Now, the government is pausing its own plan, saying requiring developers to build even five per cent of their units at affordable rates will hurt the construction of new homes.

“We need to get more shovels in the ground to build homes for families across the province — now is not the time to be adding unnecessary red tape and requirements that only increase the cost of building a home,” a spokesperson for Housing Minister Rob Flack, who introduced the legislation less than a year ago, said.

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“These temporary measures will help to ensure project viability so more people can call the city of Toronto home.”

5:19
Housing minister says it will take time to fix Ontario’s low home building statistics

The regulation posted by the provincial government proposes pausing the five per cent inclusionary zoning until July 1, 2027. It said Kitchener had already opted to pause its program.

“MMAH has heard from stakeholders expressing concerns that implementing IZ at this juncture, particularly in Toronto, could have a negative impact on overall housing supply and could result in the cancellation or pause of projects,” the regulation said.

Chow, however, said she didn’t believe the requirement was slowing development in her city. She said most builders had stopped working in current conditions, and the few that were still in construction were doing so because of financial incentives from city hall.

“People need homes they can afford,” she said. “Right here, in Toronto, seven out of 10 homes that are being built, if you see a crane, most likely it’s made possible, the building is made possible, because the city has put in financial incentives.”

The Building Industry and Land Development Association said in a statement that the delay was a “prudent” move.

“This will safeguard the already very fragile pipeline of new housing in the province as the market grapples with the lowest sales seen in decades, declining starts and mounting layoffs in the GTA,” the statement said.

“Present cost-to-build challenges, new home sales, and market conditions are extremely dire in the province and adding even more costs through IZ requirements would simply further erode project viabilities and result in even fewer housing units coming to the market.”

The Ford government ran its 2022 election campaign partly under the promise that it would build 1.5 million new homes by 2031 to lower the cost of housing in the province. It’s a strategy that has stalled to the point that the finance minister recently called the 1.5 million goal a “soft target,” after years of failing to hit key milestones, even after watering down the criteria.

Flack told Global News last year that recent provincial housing measures were designed to revive the spring market for 2026, after consecutive years where the number of housing starts in Ontario fell — often at sharper rates than the rest of the country.

The fall-off in development has perhaps been most acute in Toronto.

Between 2020 and 2025, 25 projects have stopped sales on more than 3,200 new units in and around Toronto, numbers compiled by BILD show.

A total of six projects stopped selling in 2020, with five more giving up the following year. In 2022, 10 projects abandoned sales attempts, while four more folded in 2023.

BILD said no projects had stopped selling in 2024 or 2025 because fewer than 10 highrises have even tried to launch over the last two years, as builders struggle to make the costs work and buyers stay away.

The low sales matter to builders because most condominium projects require the majority of their units to be sold in order to finalize financing to get construction off the ground.

Richard Lyall, president of RESCON, said recent data shows “we are staring into the abyss” when it comes to residential construction.

— with a file from The Canadian Press

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Gaye and Jim O’Neill have spent countless hours thinking about their daughter’s final hours in April 2023.

It’s a memory they say they’d wish on no one — and it’s the reason why they joined a years-long legal campaign to change the way medical assistance in dying is delivered in British Columbia.

The O’Neills are at the centre of a Charter of Rights challenge, now before the B.C. Supreme Court, that seeks to end the practice of so-called “forced transfers” — compelling patients to leave faith-based medical facilities before receiving medical assistance in dying.

Sam O’Neill died with medical assistance at age 34, roughly a year after she was diagnosed with cervical cancer that had spread to other parts of her body.

Her family remembers Sam, the eldest of three children, as stubborn and fiercely independent, kind and encouraging. She loved animals — so much so that she tried to convince loved ones to take up her vegan lifestyle.

“She would stick up for the rights of animals, but she also stuck up for the rights for people. She never wanted a bad word about people,” said Gaye O’Neill.

Sam travelled the world before moving from her home province of Ontario to Vancouver, where she built a rich life with a close-knit circle of friends. She wrote a travel blog, which Gaye said was “hysterically funny.”

Sam was active: she played soccer and hockey as a kid, and her kind nature and big heart endeared her to teammates. She logged a personal best time in her 10th marathon in California in December 2021.

So it was a shock to her parents when, just four months later in April 2022, they learned she was sick.

Gaye and Jim flew to Vancouver on May 1 to see her.

2:22
Charter challenge for MAID access begins in B.C. Supreme Court

“She was supposed to be running (a marathon) that day, but she was in a hospital with cancer. So it was terrible,” Jim said.

She went through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, spending that year in and out of Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital. The hospital is operated by Providence Health Care Society, a Catholic organization that runs 18 health care facilities in the Vancouver area.

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Sam was assessed for medical assistance in dying, better known as MAID, early in 2023 — something she didn’t tell her family about in advance.

“I was talking to her over the phone. She said she qualified for MAID and I thought she was getting someone to clean her house,” Jim said.

Sam wanted the option of MAID in the event that things got worse, he said.

Things got worse in March 2023. Sam hurt herself while unpacking from a move, her parents said, and she was taken back to St. Paul’s by ambulance.

Over the next several weeks, the staff tried to help her manage the pain.

“I remember one palliative care doctor saying, ‘She’s on as high a dosage that’s safe. We can’t give her more pain meds,’” Jim said.

After two painful procedures in early April, Sam decided to obtain a medically assisted death. She needed first to move from the hospital where she was receiving treatment — because Providence does not allow assisted dying in its facilities. The province of B.C. allows faith-based organizations to be exempt from its MAID policies.

Court documents filed by Providence state that Sam was aware that she wouldn’t be allowed to end her life at St. Paul’s.

Sam was transferred to St. John Hospice. The hospice itself is also run by Providence, but there is an adjacent space in the same building, which is operated by Vancouver Coastal Health, where MAID is permitted.

Her parents said her final hours were spent in agony and her ability to say goodbye to loved ones was impeded by the need to sort out logistics for her transfer.

Her parents said that when they went to see her one final time before the move, they were distressed to find her sitting on a commode and wrapped in a sheet.

“It was shocking and terrible … it was just so humiliating for her,” Gaye said.

Sam was heavily sedated for the transfer and did not wake up again.

2:11
Woman’s MAID procedure blocked by B.C. judge

Providence defended the care Sam received in court filings, stating that her family and friends were able to “say goodbye to her privately in her room throughout the day.” The organization also said she chose to be sedated before the move.

Its statement of defence also says that Sam’s condition affected her gastrointestinal function and she was “on a commode for her comfort and at her request.”

Daphne Gilbert, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said she heard about the O’Neill family’s story through the media and contacted them to see if they’d be interested in taking the case to court.

“I had been looking for and thinking about ways to litigate the issue of forced transfers, and I knew that we needed a plaintiff who would be willing to be part of the lawsuit,” she said.

Alongside advocacy group Dying With Dignity Canada and Dr. Jyothi Jayaraman — a palliative care physician who left her job with Providence Health because she disagreed with the practice of transferring MAID patients — the O’Neills are now arguing their case before the B.C. Supreme Court.

The court will be asked to decide whether institutions like Providence have the same rights to protection of freedom of religion as individuals. Providence will argue that it does and that being required to deliver MAID would infringe upon its rights.

The Charter challenge likely will end up being appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, Gilbert said.

That means Gaye and Jim O’Neill have a fight ahead of them that could last years.

“We cannot do anything at all to help Sam. There’s nothing we can do. What’s done is done,” Gaye said.

“We want to protect other people,” Jim added.