By Angela Gismondi
Special to Northern Ontario Construction News
North Bay Community Recreation Centre is aiming to raise the bar in sustainable design by being one of the first full-sized, net-zero carbon recreational facilities in Canada.
Designed to meet the Canada Green Building Council’s (CaGBC) Zero Carbon Building – Design Standard, the centre is replacing the aging West Ferris facility and will feature two regulation-size hockey rinks, a walking and running track with warm-up zones, climate-controlled spectator areas and flexible change rooms.
The facility will also include a spacious community room, meeting spaces and administrative offices, with full accessibility and barrier-free design, which was an important element of the project for the client.
In 2013, the City of North Bay did a feasibility study which determined there was a need for a new arena in the city to replace the existing infrastructure. It wasn’t until 2019 that the city moved forward with design and tendering. With cost escalation caused in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, the City decided to cancel the original design.
In December 2023, the City relaunched the project as Progressive Design-Build, with a budget cap of $59.5 million. In February 2024, a request for proposals was issued. The EllisDon, JL Richards & Associates and BBB Architects team was awarded the project in April.
“By November of 2024 we had to have the design advanced enough with the confirmed bugdet available to go to City council to have a vote to commit the funding,” said Phoebe Cullingham, manager, climate and sustainability, EllisDon.
“That’s 28 months from design award to project opening for a full design-build, which is a pretty impressive sprint for a project of this size. Because of the strict affordability ceiling, the design was submitted quite in advance…Two years had already gone past their initial opening date that they promised to constituents so there was already a lot of pressure to move the building forward quite quickly.”
The City applied for the Green and Inclusive Communities Buildings (GICB) grant and received over $25 million. The GICB funding, issued by the CaGBC, is dependent on the achievement of the Zero-Carbon Building Design Standard – Version 2.
“Because the project was delayed by so many years, the project team was actually required to meet the Version 3 requirements,” Cullingham explained.
The standard is focused on reducing the operational and embodied carbon within a building.
“It’s meant to be a simple and accessible standard so there is a lot of freedom for the design team to take different approaches that make the most sense but ultimately reduce carbon,” said Mitchell Niles, senior energy systems engineer, J.L. Richards.
“Version 3 set a new standard that the embodied carbon for the building had to be below 500 kg per metre squared or for new buildings at least a 10 per cent improvement in embodied carbon compared to an equivalent baseline building.”
The team mobilized on site in September 2024.
“Early on in the design process, in June 2024, JLR met with city staff to determine what are going to be the sustainability goals for this project,” said Niles. “We do this for any of our projects to set out at the very beginning what do we want to focus on from a sustainability perspective.”
The first priority was to meet the Zero-Carbon Building Design Standard.
“It’s a huge component of the funding for this project,” Niles noted. “We had to meet that standard in order to maintain the funding.”
The next priority was budget and schedule.
“When I talked to the project manager, I said we can’t have both, one has to take priority over the other,” explained Niles. “He said respecting the budget is ‘2 a.’ and the schedule is ‘2 b.’ because they are equally important and if you have to make some sacrifices, we would rather it be a little bit later than a little bit more expensive.”
The third priority was to plan for the future.
“We couldn’t put everything into the building but they wanted to make smart decisions throughout that design process so that any planning we could do now that would make it that much easier to incorporate these changes in the future were incorporated,” Niles stated.
Sustainable features in the facility include:
- CO2-based ice plant enabling high-grade heat recovery, significantly reducing energy needs;
- Nail-Laminated Timber (NLT) for structural components, offering a sustainable and lower-carbon building material;
- Eliminating fossil fuels for heating, using all-electric mechanical systems for space and water heating, eliminating on-site heating combustion; and
- Advanced insulation and a high-performance building envelope to minimize energy loss.
In terms of energy improvements, to reduce the energy load, the facility will use cold water flooding, have a low-e ceiling, greater envelope efficiency and reduced building area and ceiling height.
“An ice rink’s ceiling is the largest area that radiates heat down onto the ice pad,” Niles explained. “The low-e ceiling that we are using on this project has a substantial impact on the amount of heat that is being put onto the ice pad and overall it resulted in an annual building energy savings of about seven per cent of the total building.”
To maximize heat recovery, there will be heat pumps with a low-temperature loop, increased energy recovery ventilation effectiveness and heat recovery for Domestic Hot Water and spectator seating.
Overall, the design is expected to result in a 26 per cent reduction in energy consumption and nearly 50 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional arena designs.
The centre is expected to be completed in August 2026.