When Environment Canada Senior Climatologist David Phillips retired this past September, he wasn’t quite ready to call it a career.
Phillips, a beloved Canadian weather personality and self-proclaimed “collector of weather stories,” said over his 58-year career, sharing his knowledge has been a “labour of love.”
When he finally submitted the paperwork 22 years after he was first eligible to retire, Phillips said he didn’t want to go “cold turkey.” Environment Canada offered him the title of “emeritus,” allowing him to keep his company phone and laptop and do work for the government agency for free.
“I don’t have a lot of hobbies, a lot of other interests,” he said with a laugh.
Phillips officially retired in September, the day after his 80th birthday. He said that morning felt exactly like the day before. He continues to get up early every day to check the weather models and regularly takes calls from journalists across the country looking for a colourful quote for their weather stories.
“It doesn’t matter whether it is a journalism student… or whether it’s the national news. I don’t cherry pick. I just say, ‘Well who’s the next on the list,” Phillips told CP24.com in an interview earlier this week.
“Since I retired, I think I’ve had over 140 interviews.”
He initially took a job with the national weather agency in 1966, a position he thought would only be temporary.
He had gone to school to become a teacher and only held one other job previously: a room service waiter at the Banff Springs Hotel while he was in university.
“Before I joined the service, I had a job as a teacher for 2 months… a school in Windsor. A teacher had passed away and so they asked me to fill in. I thought, ‘Oh well, good. This is something I’ve always wanted to do.’ And I wasn’t very good at it because I couldn’t discipline.” Phillips said.
“I thought people should have the same energy and passion and enthusiasm that I had for it, and when they didn’t, I couldn’t understand that.”
When an opportunity opened up at the weather service, he assumed it would be a short-term gig.
“I thought, (this is my) chance to come to Toronto to see the big city,” he said. “I’ll just take a year off and do some research.”
But as his passion for weather grew, he soon abandoned his plan to become a teacher and decided to continue on with his work at Environment Canada.
When he started, he did research on the Great Lakes, looking at lake levels and winds as well as lake effect storms.
“I really liked my work, and I wrote articles presented in scientific journals, at science conferences. Then I found that there was this fascination that Canadians had for weather history and weather stories and weather events,” Phillips said.
When speaking about his scientific papers at conferences, Phillips said people had an “insatiable appetite” for information about weather events past, present, and future.
“I began to see the importance of weather to individual lives,” Phillips said.
“They needed to know before they left home, what the weather was going to be, and how we prepare for it, and then people whose lives and livelihood depend upon it, like farmers or fishermen… It doesn’t matter whether you’re a chief executive officer or a mailroom clerk.”
Over the years, Phillips carved out a role for himself at Environment Canada as a climatologist.
“I always created the job for myself and was able to explain it to management that this is necessary, this is important,” he said.
“This is as a science organization, this is what we need to do. And so I really just cultivated that want or that need for Canadians to have better information. It really grew from that.”
Phillips made it his mission to make weather information accessible to the average person.
“I tried to demystify the science aspect of it,” he said.
“If you talk about the subject like you’re going to need a PhD from MIT to talk about it, well I mean they just tune you out.”
He said he often connected with Canadians by using a more “gee wow whiz” style of communication.
“Just something weird about (the weather), something wacky,” he said. “It kind of softens them up, and then they’re willing to hear what you have to say that’s maybe important.”
He said while he didn’t pursue a traditional teaching career, in many ways he still feels like a teacher.
“My classroom is Canada,” he said with a smile. “I’ve never regretted my choice of career.”
And he doesn’t plan to stop teaching Canadians about the weather any time soon.
“I’m really enjoying retirement because I’m doing what I love,” he said.