Hockey rink gets to stay inside hay barn
When hay shed transformed into hockey rink a fight broke out over zoning
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
WATERLOO REGION — A rural Waterloo Region couple built a private indoor hockey rink inside a converted farm shed without getting a permit and skated past municipal roadblocks to win the support of their local council last month.
Overriding the advice of Woolwich Township staff who wanted to stop the use of the barn as a hockey rink, the local council approved a site-specific zoning amendment to allow the hockey games to go on.
“I’m supportive of the kids playing hockey, having fun, and this is Canada,” Councillor Eric Schwindt said, summing up the majority position before the 4-2 vote at the May 12 session in Elmira.
Two councillors opposed accommodating the Godwins on rules-are-rules grounds. The nearly 28,000-square-foot building at David and Krista Godwin’s 93-acre agriculturally-zoned property includes an asphalt parking lot with painted lines for parking 30 vehicles. A full-size minor league rink surface is about 17,000 sq. ft.
The township granted a building permit in 2020 for the sprawling shed for farm storage. By December 2022, township staff learned that the space was being used as an elaborate indoor rink in the winter. So-called ‘Godwin Gardens’ includes team benches, locker rooms, showers, refrigeration system, and Zamboni, according to information presented at the council meeting. The township’s planning department was unimpressed that modifications occurred without a separate building permit and maintained that operating an indoor ice surface violated the existing zoning.
The township argued that the building no longer served as agricultural storage during the winter months. But the lawyer for the barn owner, Scott Snider, said the structure is “typically 75 to 100 % full” of hay stored for other farmers during the growing season “until it’s emptied in October.”
He added, “This building is categorically a farm storage building, full stop.”
Conceding the rink is “beautiful — you might even call it extravagant — it’s by no means an arena,” he insisted, noting the smaller than regulation ice surface and lack of spectator seating.
Farm buildings do have traditional recreational uses, Snider also argued, leaning heavily into hockey-and-apple-pie Canadiana before the council vote. “Farms are not just where people work,” he declared. “They are also where they live and play. Skating and hockey have been a feature of farm life since at least the 1800s.”
Snider added that “barns and other agricultural buildings have been used by children and adults for play and recreation for generations,” and that “taking it indoors doesn’t change its essential nature. It’s still hockey.” The connection to farming is the reason that hockey arenas are described as “barns” to this day, he pointed out, making an emotional appeal to Canadian culture.
“Preventing the Godwins from playing in this building in the winter achieves nothing but unnecessarily interfering with their fun and recreation. That is not what the planning system is for,” he said, after assuring the council that only the owners and their friends and family use the facility, and without charge. “This is not a business.”
He was briefly joined by a 13-year-old boy at the council table who testified to his enjoyment of the facility. The lawyer also presented three testimonials from teenagers who play hockey there.
Wrote 13-year-old Carter Manes: “This rink has brought real joy and real benefit to the kids who have used it. We are not a problem to be solved. We are just young people who just want a place to skate.”
The lawyer also came armed to council with newspaper accounts of several other barn-based hockey rinks in Canada, including a 2023 Farmers Forum article of a converted hog barn in Spencerville, 50 km south of Ottawa.
Images presented at the meeting and on Google Maps show the Woolwich address punctuated by a very large mansion, at the end of a long laneway amid otherwise empty green fields and a wooded area bounded by the Grand River.
The left-wing crowd on Reddit online was not as magnanimous as the council. “Rich person doing rich person things and faces no consequences. If that’s a farmer, I’m an OnlyFans model,” one writer declared.
