When the City of Brantford first signed its original contract with the Brantford Bulldogs back in 2023, part of the agreement was to explore building a new facility large enough to support an Ontario Hockey League (OHL) team and its fans.
Roughly two years later, in December 2025, City Council officially approved plans for the $152-million Sports and Entertainment Centre (SEC).
The SEC is set to be a 5,235 fixed-seat venue that will be built beside the existing TD Civic Centre on Market Street south.
The facility will not only host its anchor tenant, the Brantford Bulldogs, but various sporting events, concerts, family shows, trade shows and conferences, and other local, regional, provincial, national and international events. The centre will be able to hold up to 7,000 for concert-style events.
The current conceptual design for the SEC comprises four levels. The main level will contain the event floor, Bulldogs team spaces, back of house space, visitor team space, green room and storage. The concourse level on the second floor will provide most facility users with seat access as well as access to a range of amenities such as a lounge, food and beverage services, team store and restrooms.
The suite level on the third floor will contain private suites, some additional premium seats, and areas for media and press. The fourth and final level will contain mechanical mechanical systems and a catwalk to access an overhead rigging grid.
In regards to parking, following the completion of the SEC, there will be 1,647 parking spaces available within the immediate vicinity of the facility including on the site itself [about 360 spots], at Earl Haig Family Fun Park, at the Icomm Drive Parkade and at the Brantford Farmer’s Market.
Dathe Wong of Stantect Architecture Ltd., the project’s lead architect, recently spoke with the Brant Beacon to discuss the vision for the SEC, saying that a significant amount of thought and detail went into designing the ideal space for the City’s needs.
When asked what some of the City of Brantford’s top design priorities were in collaborating with
Stantec Wong said there were several considerations surrounding the atmosphere.
“There were a whole host of things, but I would say it was really about bringing back a typology that would both be a civic attraction as well as a high-performance performance space for Brantford. The city has gone through a series of changes,” he said. “I think downtown Brantford would really do well with an enhanced civic building that would bring back a richer civic life to the area, and so that was kind of a key component. Hockey is very much a part of Brantford, and so naturally, kind of centering it around a sports and entertainment complex was important. Also Brantford has a winning hockey team that needs a new home and so those are all of the things that kind of came together to form this.
Wong stressed that while the Sports and Entertainment Centre will be the new home for the Brantford Bulldogs, the TD Civic Centre isn’t going anywhere.
“It’s still functioning and this is meant to be the new home for the Bulldogs, but there’s no immediate plans for that [TD Civic Centre] to be replaced,” he continued. “So these potentially could work, kind of in-concert with each other. They’re right next door to each other so we see them as kind of creating a little bit of a hub too.”
When asked what kind of details and features go into creating a multi-use space that will not only support the Brantford of today, but the Brantford of tomorrow, Wong said it begins with understanding what the building is intended for. It’s not just a hockey area, it’s a sports and entertainment centre, he said.
With that in mind, he and his team had to consider how the building would interact with the surrounding area, and how the space would be used throughout the year.
“We were very conscious to say that this building was, number one, a civic building. Yes, it’s designed to host high performance sports, but also other types of entertainment. On a Saturday night when the Bulldogs are playing, we expect that it will be a fantastic evening event. The seats will be full, the restaurants will be full, the plaza will be full of people and they’ll be there early to enter, have a great time and then stream out. But we also wanted this [building] to function really well on a Sunday morning, when families are out with their young kids and so on. One of the questions we ask our team, together with our client, is, ‘What else is happening in those areas?’ How are we relating to the river and all of those kinds of components? We were very much thinking of this as an all year around and multifunctional kind of space.”
Wong went on to say that one of the key planning decisions the team made was to position the Sports and Entertainment Centre directly on Market Street.
“One of the things that we immediately noticed is that Market Street doesn’t have that ‘Main Street’ kind of feel, where it’s pedestrianized. So we could have pushed it back, but we wanted people to have the ability to treat the area as a kind of civic space where you might have shops and a café and to use that as a kind of main street. We wanted to have functioning as both a civic building, as well as a high performance sports space.”
As far as managing the City’s objectives while keeping key public feedback, such as parking concerns and efficiently moving crowds, in mind, Wong said it’s a balancing act that requires weighing the priorities of stakeholders and the public while navigating the long-term vision alongside immediate concerns.
“It truly is a balance. …It’s about having lots of conversations to have consensus on the totality of the vision,” he explained. “There are certain limitations on things, and I’ll include parking as one of those things where, like closet space, you can never have too much. But I think one of the key [considerations with stakeholders] was to have a walkable place that prioritizes pedestrians.”
Noting that in design, you can either prioritize cars or prioritize pedestrians, he and his team ultimately focused on accessibility and getting people into the building.
“Convenient, free parking was not more important than getting people into this building, and I think those are some of the challenges that we had to determine, but I think there’s plenty of parking in the downtown area to support this size of venue,” said Wong. “I would say that we were, again, prioritizing what we call the fan experience, prioritizing the civic components, prioritizing affordability, and really touching on sustainability and having a long term facility for Brantford that everyone could be proud of.”
Given the buzz surrounding the project’s price tag, both online and in various public meetings, Wong said that collaboration is key when it comes to balancing budget constraints and maintaining design priorities.
The SEC is being delivered under a model called “progressive design-build” which means that the builder is ultimately responsible for providing and getting pricing from trade members on all the components going into the building.
“Design decisions are made together with pricing in mind, so we are able to react to that and have very real discussions about the things that are nice to have and the must haves, and how we begin to kind of balance those things,” he said.
The Stantec team has a sort of list that they consider their core principles, things they care deeply about like the fan experience, accessibility, sustainability, constructability and ease of maintenance, and measure each of the design elements and items against those, explained Wong.
“We were having discussions around a particular kind of countertop and there was a cheaper way of doing them that would still look good, but we said, ‘We’re going to prioritize maintenance and cleanability, etc.’ So there’s a balancing component that we’re certainly looking at, but we’re looking at this as kind of a long-term facility. On a daily basis, we’re having discussions and making decisions together with our client and our builder, …and we’re trying to balance those pieces.”
He said that if there was ever a time the project would be trending to over budget, the design team would find any opportunities they could for cost savings and meet with the builder, the City and the Brantford Bulldogs (given that they’ll be the primary tenant), and together they would score those savings against the project’s core principles.
“Simply taking away certain things for immediate savings, may not be the best in the long-term interest of the project. Obviously they would help us kind of align with our current costing, but I think those are constant discussions that we would be having,” said Wong. “We would have a series of things that would be tabled, we would say, ‘here are the pros and cons of each of these decisions,’ and as a group, …we would make a final decision around those elements.”
When it comes to Wong’s perspective on how the SEC and its design will transform the community and the downtown area, he said he hopes it will showcase the city.
“I’ve heard that Brantford considers itself the Tournament Capital of Ontario, and we certainly hope that this venue will continue to do that from a sports perspective. We’re hoping that this will be an example of being able to use the sports typology to really have a transformational effect on the civic spaces of Brantford,” he said. “Mid-size cities across Ontario and across the country, have the challenge of the pull of a large city nearby, but I think there’s obviously many people who choose, and rightly so, to pick mid-size cities as their place to live and raise families, and they absolutely deserve to have top-notch facilities. So we’re hoping that this will showcase that, and be kind of a legacy for Brantford, and continue to just be one more piece of what makes Brantford a great place to be and live.”
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
