The unexpected departure of Robert Dutton, CEO of RONA for the last 20 years, has breathed new life into the possibility that Lowe’s will finally get its hands on Canada’s largest home improvement chain. Dutton stepped down on Nov.  9, two months after he and his board of directors fended off a takeover by Lowe’s. Dutton said he had new initiatives in store for the Boucherville, Quebec-based RONA, which put in a poor performance in its last quarter.

The weather is always a popular topic in discussions of retail performance, but it seems this recent quarter has produced a storm of exceptionally intense meteorological commentary.

The following are just some of the examples of CEOs talking about the weather taken from news reports of the past several days:

Canadian home-improvement retailer RONA is still looking for commercial and pro-oriented acquisitions in the United States -- and it has as much as C$300 million (US$316 million) to spend, according to a Reuters article. 

RONA CEO Robert Dutton told Reuters in an interview last week that his Quebec-based company is focusing on U.S. distributors or commercial and professional-orientated units, rather than customer-facing retail stores.