A Hill Worth Saving: How North Bay Went From Bailing Out a Ski Club to Owning the Mountain

For a decade, Laurentian Ski Hill survived the way a lot of small-town ski hills survive: on thin margins, volunteer labour, and periodic rescue money from City Hall. This week, North Bay City Council closed the loop on that arrangement. Councillors approved a three-year lease and operating agreement with the Laurentian Ski Hill and Snowboard Club — the first full operating deal since the municipality took formal ownership of the hill's land this past spring.

It is a small piece of paperwork with a much bigger backstory: a municipality's slow, deliberate decision to absorb a piece of recreational infrastructure that a conservation authority could no longer comfortably carry, at a moment when small ski hills across Northern Ontario and the Canadian North are being quietly weighed, propped up, or let go.

From subsidy to ownership

The chairlifts on the Laurentian Escarpment, just minutes from downtown North Bay, have been turning for close to a century. For much of the modern era they were the responsibility of the North Bay–Mattawa Conservation Authority (NBMCA), which had held the roughly 50 hectares of escarpment land — hill, trails, and the Interpretive Centre building at the summit — since the late 1990s.

That ownership model started to buckle in 2023. Facing the prospect of the hill closing for the season without help, the City agreed to a one-year, up-to-$100,000 operational subsidy on top of the roughly $60,000 a year it already contributed to operating costs. "This is a one-year operational subsidy as we work into a transition plan to take over the hill," Mayor Peter Chirico said at the time, adding that provincial legislation would eventually require the conservation authority to divest itself of the ski hill altogether.

The "one-year" subsidy became a three-year habit. Council approved similar funding again in 2024 and again in September 2025, by which point the City's contributions — between the base operating support, the top-up subsidy, and roughly $65,000 a year in capital investment — had become a fixture of the budget rather than an emergency measure. Not every councillor was comfortable with that drift. Councillor Tanya Vrebosch cast the lone dissenting vote in 2025, arguing the arrangement lacked public accountability. "I don't agree with a third year of subsidizing the ski hill without providing some kind of report or something to the public," she said. "Everybody else has to do it, but we keep this one."

That pressure, plus the conservation authority's own uncertain footing amid provincial moves to consolidate conservation authorities' mandates, pushed the two sides toward something more permanent. In April 2026, following a closed-session discussion, Council approved a $1.4-million deal to buy the escarpment lands outright from the NBMCA — the ski hill, the Interpretive Centre, and the surrounding trail network that forms part of the Laurentian Escarpment Community Trails Conservation Area.

"This agreement provides certainty and long-term stability for the future use of the lands and represents an important investment by the City of North Bay in protecting a regional asset," Chirico, who also sits on the NBMCA board, said in a release announcing the purchase. Under the deal, the conservation authority stayed on as a tenant in its former headquarters at the summit, leasing the space back from the City, while the ski club continued running day-to-day operations under a new agreement still to be negotiated.

Councillor Gary Gardiner, describing a March-break outing with his grandchildren, called the escarpment "this magical property in the middle of a city." "Very few cities have this kind of an opportunity, to preserve it and maintain it for future generations," he said.

What council just signed off on

This week's three-year lease and operating agreement is that promised follow-through: a formal contract laying out how the Laurentian Ski Hill and Snowboard Club will run the facility on land the City now owns outright, rather than land held in trust by a third-party conservation authority. It replaces the improvised, year-to-year subsidy cycle that had defined the relationship since 2023 with a multi-year framework — the kind of "report to the public" that critics like Vrebosch had been pushing for.

For the club, municipal ownership offers something a conservation authority operating under budget strain never could: a landlord with deeper pockets and a direct political stake in keeping the lifts running. For the City, it turns an occasional, headline-grabbing subsidy vote into a predictable, budgeted line item tied to an asset it now controls.

Mayor Chirico has been consistent in how he frames that trade-off. "We know that this is an economic development tool we utilize day in and day out within our City," he has said. "Having a ski hill in operation for our kids is no different than an arena, ballpark, or soccer field."

The numbers back up the "economic engine" framing, at least by local standards. Laurentian draws an estimated 35,000 visitors a season, supports more than 70 paid jobs and a volunteer base of over 100, and contributes roughly $4.7 million annually to the local economy, according to figures city officials have cited repeatedly since 2023. Ottawa has also been putting money behind the hill's future: the Laurentian Ski Hill Snowboarding Club received a $220,960 federal contribution through FedNor's Northern Ontario Development Program to help the operation grow from a purely winter facility into a four-season destination, while the Discovery Routes Trails Organization has drawn on a separate FedNor contribution to market the surrounding escarpment trail network.

The bigger pattern: small hills, public money

North Bay's path — years of subsidy, followed by outright public ownership — is not an isolated case. It echoes a pattern playing out across small-market ski operations in Canada for at least the past decade, as rising costs, shorter winters, and thin private margins have made stand-alone hills increasingly dependent on municipal or public support.

In Greater Sudbury, city-run hills at Adanac, Lively, and Capreol lost a combined $310,000 in a single winter roughly a decade ago, prompting officials to talk openly about running them "closer to a break-even" rather than turning a profit. Around the same period, the NBMCA itself was warning that Laurentian could face its last season without more municipal money — a conservation authority official at the time called on area councils to find an additional $65,000 a year, warning that "if we don't pony up here, that asset will be gone."

Farther afield, Whitehorse's Mount Sima went through a rockier version of the same story: city council there rejected the operating ski society's request for a $400,000 bailout, sending the club back to find a leaner business plan while council members expressed support for keeping the hill open in principle. The through-line in all these cases is the same: outside of the handful of large commercial resorts, few small ski hills in Northern and Northern-adjacent Canada now operate without direct public subsidy in some form.

What sets North Bay apart is how far it has been willing to go to make that support permanent — moving past annual subsidy votes to outright land ownership, then formalizing operations with a multi-year lease. It is a bet that owning the mountain outright, rather than continually rescuing someone else's asset, is the more sustainable way to keep a 100-year-old community fixture running through leaner winters ahead.

What's next

The lease and operating agreement runs three years, giving both the City and the ski club a fixed horizon to demonstrate the arrangement can pay for itself — or at least come close. Questions remain about the long-term shape of the deal: the precise terms of the NBMCA's lease-back at the summit building, how capital costs like lift maintenance will be shared going forward, and whether the promised shift toward four-season programming can widen the hill's revenue base beyond a roughly 35,000-visitor winter season.

For now, skiers heading up the escarpment this winter will find the same rope tows, the same 300-foot vertical drop, and the same volunteer-heavy club running the show. What's changed is who owns the mountain underneath them.