Hi there, I’m Tobi Nussbaum, the Chief Executive Officer of the National Capital Commission
and welcome to Capital Stories.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the Rideau Canal Skateway, a signature
Canadian destination in the nation’s capital, of course, that brings joy and laughter and
sometimes falls, year after year, to so many residents and visitors to the National Capital
Region.
It all started in 1971 with a hand shovel and now, over 50 years later, it is the world’s
largest skating rink.
So today, we are going to talk a little bit about it with someone who you might recognize
from, well, all of our channels, really, of social media, Bruce Devine, our Senior Manager
of Facilities and Programs at the NCC.
Welcome Bruce.
Thank you, Tobi.
Hello.
I mentioned that we’ve been at this for more than 50 years.
It might be worth just reviewing what happened in that key winter of 1970–1971.
The idea, which originated from the NCC’s Chairman at the time, Douglas Fullerton, was
to see if the NCC could turn this frozen thing into a skating rink.
And so, as the story goes, on January 18, 1971, he sent a crew out with shovels to try and
clear a five-kilometre stretch between the National Arts Centre and Bronson Avenue, and
they succeeded.
And so, witnessing the success of this pilot project in 1971, 55 years later, 54 years later, we
now have the world’s largest skating rink at 7.8 kilometres.
I’m sure it’s hard for you to imagine these days doing that with your crew with hand shovels.
We’ve got more modern equipment. But before we get to talking about what it takes to maintain
and operate the Rideau Canal Skateway today, let’s go back to your early days on the Skateway.
When you were a little boy, anticipating what you would be doing with the rest of your life,
one doubts that you said, I want to be the senior manager responsible for operating the
world’s largest skateway—but here you are.
Can you tell us a little bit about your first seasons working on the Rideau Canal and what
you had to learn?
Yes, I’ve got fond memories about that.
This is my thirteenth year with the Skateway.
I’ve got more than 35 years of managing special events, and I had no experience with managing
on the ice rink.
So, I remember my first day coming at the NCC, thinking of… what have I done, working with
the world’s largest skating rink.
I was nervous… really nervous.
And my fear was, what if somebody goes through the ice?
So, I had to learn everything.
And the team that I was surrounded with are just fabulous.
And they helped me out.
I learned so much with the contractors as well.
And over time, we’ve looked to reach some efficiencies in our operations to be better.
Fantastic.
So, I’m curious about those.
So can you speak a little bit to behind the scenes, what goes into preparing and maintaining
the ice every season?
Can you take us through to sort of the beginning of when the teams start to work on the ice?
Well, the full team is on deck in September, in the fall.
It’s a team of four people.
And what we start to do there, we fabricate whatever we need to fabricate.
If we want to have it, we want to change the arch of an entrance.
We do repair.
We finish all of our repairs.
Because coming end of October, Parks Canada, who owns the Rideau Canal, lowers the water
for us to install all the big assets, the vehicle ramps, 35 staircases, five UA ramps,
that sort of thing… the chalets, the washrooms, the skate rentals.
We have a three-week window to do all of that.
After that, the water level rises to what we call the ice level.
And we wait for starting to freeze a little bit.
Once we have a good four or five inches, the ice crew can go on it and start watering it
and build the ice.
And eventually, we’re close to the opening, and then we deploy all the small equipment.
Over 200 benches, picnic tables, fire pits, you name it, maps, and so forth.
And then we’re into the daily management.
We have a checklist every day.
We make sure that it’s safe
and we work with all the contractors.
Once everybody’s on deck, we’re over 225 people working to do the garbage, the clean-up of
the washrooms, the fire pits, the management of the ice.
And come spring, we take everything out.
And summer, we start re-planning, we repair things, and the whole cycle starts again.
Okay.
Like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain, it all starts again in September.
Now, we’re talking a lot about ice and the process of maintaining the ice, but of course,
the Rideau Canal is much more than the ice.
So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what happens in terms of activities, in terms
of animation, and the logistics that go into making sure that people can buy a BeaverTail
every year.
Yes.
This is an internationally known, I don’t know if you realize that… I’ve been receiving
calls over the years from Russia, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, as to what’s our project
all about, and how do we go about this?
And meeting these tourists on the Skateway, talking to us about what a great experience
this is.
Of course, the experience is skating between these two walls.
There’s something to be said about that.
Right in the heart of the nation’s capital, with the buildings surrounding us, and as
you said earlier, with the memories, but everything has to end with the BeaverTail.
It’s part of the—even families—the main motivation is, let’s go for a skate ride,
and then we come back, we’ve got to have that BeaverTail.
The lineups are incredibly long, but these guys have a good operation, and it goes very
quickly.
So, it’s not just BeaverTails, of course, there are other food and beverages.
So, what would be someone’s options if they’re on the canal, and feeling hungry or thirsty?
Yes, that’s right.
Asian food was offered, regular hamburgers, and there was a beer offering as well.
There was a trial, which was very nice.
I forgot the exact word, but you receive your beer, and there was an iron in the fire pit,
and they were freezing it in the beer, and it was bubbling, and people really appreciated
it, and it was an experience to do that on the ice.
So there’s a distillery as well, it was at Concord, so that typically is the menu offered.
So, most of the year, people don’t like drinking warm beer, but having a nice warm beer in
the middle of the winter skating season can actually be a good thing.
Obviously, there have been some challenges for the Rideau Canal Skateway, particularly
as we see the climate change, and the 2023 season, of course, did not go well.
We weren’t able to open the canal.
What did we learn from that experience?
Obviously, Mother Nature was not our friend—warm temperatures, lots of thawing and freezing.
What did we learn from that, and how are we adapting to climate change in terms of our operations?
Typically, when we do ice cores, we look at the ice quality, and look at the various layers.
And that year, unfortunately, we got rain, freezing rain, some snow, not enough cold,
and water wasn’t captured between two layers of ice.
And that was poor quality, couldn’t sustain weight at all.
So, we start having our thinking cap on and working with lighter equipment, which we put
in good hands last year, whereas we started to work with ETVs instead of pickup trucks
and big tractors.
But luckily enough, we didn’t have a lot of snow last year, because it’s still a challenge.
How can we get rid of the snow with smaller equipment, but that they perform very well?
So that’s something we’re going to look into.
Another lesson learned, as a trial, it’s walking—offering a walking corridor.
It was a trial last year, and this year we formalized it, and we had a corridor set up,
and people enjoyed it so much.
Elderly people loved it as well, because it wasn’t slippery, but still they could walk
between these two walls on the canal.
So those are the things that we’re learning.
We’re learning… our biggest challenge is the water being discharged through the drains
is warm water.
So, it’s warmer than the ice, it creates some of the challenges, and the amount being discharged,
especially downtown at Rideau, is a big challenge for us.
And we’ve been working closely, I know, with Carleton University, with a couple of researchers
and profs there.
Can you speak a little bit to some of the experiments, even if they weren’t successful.
What kind of ways are they looking at in terms of helping us either form ice earlier or keep
the ice in shape longer?
I had met 15 professors, and two of them wanted to do this research program with us.
So, in 2023, in December, the hypothesis is how can we extend our season?
And we were in a paradigm in thinking of working towards the end, how can we extend it?
And then we’ve changed our ideas through consultation, and it’s at the beginning of the year if we
have to extend it.
So, with the slush cannon, we try to create, through slush… it’s an air machine that you
put water in there, then it sends out some small crystals in the air, and then it falls
underwater and creates slush and eventually ice.
Though we did some trials in 2023 in December, twice, we managed to create 0.5 centimetres
of ice.
Now the challenge and the team’s going to look at that, the researcher, is how can we
make that more efficiently, costly, rentals, logistics?
Because we use potable water, as I said, the water is warmer in the canal, so we use cold
water.
There’s only one fire hydrant near the canal.
The second test, we trucked the water.
So there’s the logistics behind all of that.
But it looks that it’s working.
But in all these scenarios, we need the cold, if it’s not cold.
One thing we got, it’s proven now, we always felt that when we read the weather forecast
and it calls for a minus 10 overnight, for us, on the canal, it’s two degrees warmer.
So for us, we work with minus eight, minus seven.
So sometimes we don’t have enough cold to freeze what we’re watering.
And one of the professors, his name is Cole, what he was telling me, and he’s still going
to reaffirm his numbers, but because of the warm water, we all know that the water freezes
at zero degrees.
It appears that us, it starts around minus two.
And this is going to look into that to tell us how truthful this is, but that seems to
be the modelling that we’re getting.
Yeah, that’s interesting because you mentioned the warmer water under the ice and the explanation
for that in part is that you have storm sewers from the neighbourhood draining into the canal
right closer to the downtown portion.
And from the salt of the roads, that’s more brackish water.
It freezes at a warmer temperature. Sorry, it doesn't freeze at zero degrees, it freezes
at a colder temperature.
And for that reason, because people often ask us, why can’t the downtown portion be
opened as quickly as the portions further south?
And I think you’ve just given us the answer, which is the water isn’t necessarily warm
enough to freeze.
We don’t get the thickness that we require.
Is that about right?
That’s about right.
There’s one more information I can tell you about the Laurier drain that we call it.
The drain itself, the pipe, has a radius of five feet.
And I remember from our data, December 17, 2023, I think it's ’23, there was
a big flush of water that came out of there.
The professor told me it’s the amount of water that came out of there equals nine Olympic
swimming pools.
From Laurier Bridge to kilometre zero, it’s like if you change the whole volume of water
5.5 times.
Wow.
It’s massive.
Yeah.
So, we try to manage that, that number of water discharge.
We don’t have that often, but it does create a challenge.
And this is why we have some difficulties in that area.
Right.
So, I think what I’m hearing is we’re doing our best to adapt to climate change.
We’re working with partners like researchers at Carleton University to try and extend the
season, to try and get ice formed earlier.
But at the end of the day, it’s going to be an uphill battle, particularly as we look
at long-term weather patterns and forecasts for, of course, a warming climate.
One of the things I know we’ve talked about within the NCC is whether we could ever have
a portion of the Rideau Canal Skateway frozen using pipes, very similar to refrigerated
skating rinks, and that would be a massive endeavor.
It would cost a lot of money, it would take a lot of study to look at the feasibility.
But do you think at the end of the day, the Rideau Canal Skateway is worth saving?
Do you think it’s something that we should be looking at in order to ensure that in
future generations, we have this incredible asset?
Or do you think it’s best to throw our hands up and say, you know what, we’re going to
have to do whatever Mother Nature delivers?
I think we have to do anything we can to keep it.
It’s this icon, as I said earlier, it’s internationally known, nationally as well.
It creates so much memories.
And just looking at this year, we had the 1.1 million visits.
As I was skating, I was listening to people and the laughter that I heard, the family
stories; the people were just relaxing and having fun.
And in the heart of the nation’s capital, it’s part of our DNA.
So I think it’s worthwhile making the effort to keep it.
Yeah, I think you make an important point.
I couldn’t help but notice this year, with a very successful season, what were we, 52
days, that it really, to me, changed the feeling of the Capital.
People were excited.
I think it helped to animate the downtown core.
I spoke to restaurant managers who said business was better because people were attracted to
the downtown core and wanted to skate.
And it just seemed, as you said, that that feeling of joy permeated throughout the region,
especially given our numbers were well over a million visitors.
And so I don’t disagree with you.
I do think, despite the challenges, it’s something that we have to look at.
We have to innovate.
We have to figure out how we can ensure this is an asset that’s available to future generations.
And I also want to thank you and the team, because I think things like the walking trail
and giving people an opportunity to experience a very special thing, as you say, it’s this
piece of ice between two walls.
And it’s very special to be out there with your fellow citizens experiencing this on cold
but hopefully sunny days.
And so I think on behalf of everyone in the National Capital Region and particularly within
the NCC, Bruce, I want to thank you for your work and your willingness to be out there
on social media explaining the operations of the Rideau Canal Skateway to everybody.
And I am thankful for the work you do.
And I wish you much luck with the upcoming season.
And let’s hope this season is as good.
If not, maybe we can hope for better than the last one.
So, all the best.
And again, thank you very much for joining me today as well.
Looking forward to it.
Thank you for having me.
All the best.