On a frigid February evening, nearly forty people pile into the Block Public House on Main Street in North Bay, Ontario. They’ve shed massive parkas, toques, and scarves to reveal their date-night best; they are ready to speed-date seven strangers each.
Though the city has over 52,000 residents, it has a tendency to feel like a small town. Hallmark movies like Christmas Inheritance have capitalized on this feeling and are often filmed here. But while the city frequently acts as the setting of rom coms, it can actually be a hard place to make new connections.
Incidentally, many of the speed daters, who are wearing name tags, bump into familiar faces, who are also looking to find a match amongst several dozen strangers at their local pub.
“It’s more relaxing than I thought, because there’s people I know,” says Allyson, adding that getting out of the house was one of her main priorities for the night, and seeing friends in the crowd is a bonus.
While the small-town vibes come with some pros, like familiar faces and cute mom-and-pop shops on the shores of Lake Nipissing, they also come with cons: it can be hard to date, especially for people over the age of thirty.
“Being in my forties, I just feel like you could be in any city, and that’s just a rough age to date, but North Bay being smaller . . .” Allyson says. “I was like, nothing could be worse than the apps, might as well give it a try.”
Even though almost 18 percent of Canadian couples have met online, some attendees I spoke to use words like “sad” and “disappointing” to describe the dating life in North Bay, recalling the “horndogs” and potential “serial killers” they’d been meeting on the dating apps.
Posters on North Bay Reddit threads echo these sentiments, with users relaying that limiting their searches to North Bay city boundaries left them few options, while other Redditors point out expanding geographic boundaries led to more choices but with longer commutes. Others point to a missing demographic of people in their late twenties and thirties, saying many young people leave North Bay when it’s time to go to university or shortly after to find work.
Noticing the gap in North Bay’s dating scene, the night’s organizer, Tia Foisy, took inspiration from her favourite speed dating reality show, The Button, where an electronic button on the table asks participants provocative questions. This event is the first date night she’s put together at the bar.
“Everybody’s always telling us that they want new things,” Foisy says. “Especially for the over-thirty age group, there’s nowhere to meet people. Like, where do people go . . . the grocery store?”
But dating struggles and app fatigue aren’t just Northern Ontario issues. In a 2023 survey from Shift Collab and Angus Reid, 60 percent of Canadians admitted to feeling isolated and as though everyone is in a relationship but them. And a 2024 study of dating apps in the US showed 78 percent of users felt emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by them.
Beyond the romance aspect, it can simply be hard to find fun and connection on these freezing nights. Part of that is intrinsic to a smaller, car-centric Northern city with fewer spaces to meet. You need to make more of an effort to get out of the house, given the nearly six-foot-high snowbanks. Another factor is the closure of beloved local hangouts during COVID-19. The North Bay community staple Wildwoods Brewery, which used to host a well-attended weekly trivia night, also closed this past winter.
Research shows that in Canada, the number of third places—or places where people can connect with others outside of their homes and workplaces—is declining. Access to them is becoming more difficult due to closures and the rising costs of going to places like coffee shops, a former third-place mainstay.
The event has sold out quickly, too, especially the women’s slots, Foisy says, adding that she had to close the women’s registrations a week and a half earlier than the men’s. She promises that while this event is geared to men and women looking for the opposite sex, they plan to open future events to different demographics, including the LGBTQ+ community, if they can get enough traction on this first go.
Foisy is a newlywed herself, and her husband, Cole Hampel, is a manager at the pub. He serves up red wines, vodka sodas, and a hot chocolate or two, adding it’s nice to bring in business on a Tuesday, typically a dead night for the city’s main drag. Foisy and Hampel were lucky enough to meet at their previous workplace, another North Bay bar and restaurant. This may be less common in the “WFH” era, since 32 percent of Canadian employees now work mostly from home, compared to 2016, when just 4 percent worked remotely.
Foisy has put out colourful individual notebooks for each attendee to write down impressions about their potential matches from the night and things to remember about them. She has also left ice-breaker prompts on the table, ranging from benign queries about favourite drinks to “Are you a possessive person?” and “If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?”—in the style of The Button.
After each five-minute date, participants feverishly jot down details in their notebooks during the two-minute breaks—it’s not easy to remember so many names, interests, and potential matches.
Joy, who is in her forties, says she’s never done anything like this before but calls it a very positive experience. “They’ve done an amazing job” organizing the event, she says, “which definitely calms the nerves.”
Most of the speed daters I spoke to say they are looking to make connections, or people to casually date, rather than to find a soulmate in particular. “I don’t consider myself an introvert, but it’s very hard to meet people, especially since COVID,” Joy says.
As the speed dates wrap up, some participants leave quickly, uttering hurried goodbyes, but others stay to mix and mingle for a while longer by the bar as staff surreptitiously dim the lights. The romances filmed in North Bay often feature connections that happen organically and effortlessly in places like the local pub or coffee shop. But, in reality, you often need a bit of help from a community organizer like Foisy to make it happen.
