Canada's Kaitlyn Weaver, Andrew Poje win ice dance gold at Skate Canada

Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje of Canada celebrate their gold medal win in the ice dance free dance at Skate Canada International in Lethbridge, Alta. on Oct. 31, 2015. (Jonathan Hayward / The Canadian Press)

LETHBRIDGE, Alta. -- Canada's Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje were within one event of a perfect season.

But a bronze medal at the world championships last March sent the ice dancers into the off-season stinging, and vowing to do better.

The skaters from Waterloo, Ont., were back on top of the podium Saturday, winning gold at Skate Canada International.

"We feel like we still have an ax to grind," Weaver said. "We still want to come home with a gold medal from worlds. Period. And so that's a huge motivating factor going into this year."

Weaver and Poje dazzled the Enmax Centre audience with their free dance to Max Richter's haunting "On the Nature of Daylight," and scored 173.79 points for the victory.

American siblings Maia and Alex Shibutani were second with 168.36, while Ekaterina Bobrova and Dmitri Soloviev of Russia claimed the bronze with 161.11.

Reigning world championships Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford added a second gold for Canada, winning the pairs event by a huge margin. Duhamel, from Lively, Ont., and Radford, from Balmertown, Ont., scored 216.16 points.

Russia's Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov scored 191.19, while Kirsten Moore-Towers of St. Catharines, Ont., and Michael Marinaro of Montreal won bronze (174.85).

Earlier, American Ashley Wagner ran away with gold in women's singles.

Weaver and Poje won Skate Canada last season in Kelowna, B.C., to spark a spectacular season of victory upon victory that firmly affixed them as the favourites going into the world championships in Shanghai.

But it wasn't meant to be, and the Canadians came home with bronze.

"We still haven't achieved all our goals that we want to," Poje said. "We know that we deserve to be at the top so we wanted to push ourselves to prove to everyone, but mostly to ourselves, that we can be better than everyone else, better versions than what we think we can be."

Weaver said the two sat down and watched their performances on video after the world championships. They needed to know where it went wrong.

"It was a hard pill to swallow, to be honest, to be winning everything, and then not all of a sudden," Weaver said. "And we watched our videos and we thought 'We can do better than this.'

"Just because we came home with a gold medal from almost every event, doesn't mean that we've reached the top of our potential. And so that was a huge motivating factor."

Wagner was the class of the women's field, scoring 202.52 points with an almost flawless program to music from "Moulin Rouge" that included seven triple jumps.

"It was practice for me and an opportunity to train the program under pressure for nationals and worlds, which are my main focuses this year," said Wagner, a three-time U.S. national champion.

"To go out and deliver that performance and receive that score, with the mistakes that I had, I think that's a really good sign for things to come this season, and I think that for me it's just really going to be about keeping my head on straight, doing that over and over and over again."

Russia's reigning world champion Elizaveta Tuktamysheva moved up from seventh after the short program to finish second with 188.89, while Yuka Nagai of Japan won bronze (172.92).

Gabrielle Daleman of Newmarket, Ont., finished fifth, while Veronik Mallet of Sept-Iles, Que., was ninth.

Kaetlyn Osmond dropped from fourth to 11th, falling four times in her long program. The 19-year-old from Marystown, N.L., is making a comeback after a gruesome broken leg sidelined her for all of last season.

"It just wasn't my day apparently," Osmond said.

The two-time Canadian champion had a rough week, crashing into the boards in Thursday's practice, then falling hard into full splits in Friday's short program.

"Physically, I've felt better," Osmond said. "It's been a hard week. . . I've been doing lots and lots of treatment while I was here. I'm sure in my subconscious it was probably playing in the back of my mind that whole program."