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North Bay, Ontario (Canada)

Nipissing District

1:2 image by Eugene Ipavec
Source: Canadian City Flags, Raven 18

North Bay
Current Flag
Police Service flag

See also:

North Bay

The City of North Bay (53,966 inhabitants in 2006; 31,492 ha) is located 125 km east of Sudbury, at equal distance (330 km) from Ottawa and Toronto.

From its beginnings as a settlement of the Nipissing Indians, North Bay has been a transportation centre. North Bay lies on the Route of the Voyageurs – that watery highway that leads to the interior of North America through which most of our legendary explorers and missionaries followed to seek their fame and fortune. The first commerce in the area was carried out by canoe, and the fact that North Bay was on a system of interconnected waterways was very important. [...]

The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian National Railways, and the Ontario Northland Railway, established North Bay as the major transportation centre for the region. [...] As mining and lumber developed in regions to the north and east, North Bay became a supply and a regional centre for education and health care. [...] North Bay’s first inhabitants came with the railway in the early 1880s and it grew to be incorporated into a city in 1925. In 1968, North Bay amalgamated with surrounding townships to become, at the time, the largest municipality in terms of area in Canada.

Source: Extracts from North Bay Community Profile, available in full on the town's website.

North Bay is the birth place of the alpine skier Kate Pace (b. 1969), World Champion in downhill at Morioka (1993) and winner of two World Cup downhill events (Lillehammer, 1993; Tignes, 1994). Source: skimuseum.ca

Corbeil, incorporated to North Bay long time ago, was the birth place of the famous Dionne quintuplets (b. 28 May 1934). Source: partice.physics.ucdavis.edu.
Ivan Sache, 26 March 2009

Current Flag

Text and image(s) from Canadian City Flags, Raven 18 (2011), courtesy of the North American Vexillological Association, which retains copyright. Image(s) by permission of Eugene Ipavec.

Design

The flag of the City of North Bay is a Canadian pale design of green-white-blue with the city’s logo in the centre. The logo contains a blue arch and ring between two vertical green bars which are solid at the top and dissipate into sparsely arranged mosaic blocks at their bases. The width of the arch is approximately three times that of each vertical green bar. Its underside forms a shallow arch; its top arches very slightly. Atop the arch sits a fan-like arrangement in blue resembling an open book viewed in cross-section, with three “page” highlights: one in the centre at a 90-degree angle; the other two on either side at an approximate 45-degree angle. A blue ovoid ring intersects the arch’s left third, with the portion that overlaps the arch in white, and angling at 45 degrees toward the lower right under the arch. The lower section of the ring is broken off into four blue discs, continuing the ovoid shape of the ring, with the largest disc at the ring’s lowest point and the succeeding circles diminishing in size. A faint shadow of the ring appears at the lower right, in green.
Doreen Braverman, Canadian City Flags, Raven 18, 2011

Symbolism

North Bay calls itself “The Gateway to the North”, and a prominent landmark is the arch which once spanned the main north-south route and the entrance to North Bay. The city’s logo incorporates a stylized representation of that arch. First constructed in 1928 by the North Bay Travelers, the arch became the official logo of the city in 1934, when the group was incorporated as the North Bay Club of the Associated Canadian Travelers.
Doreen Braverman, Canadian City Flags, Raven 18, 2011

Selection

Unknown.
Doreen Braverman, Canadian City Flags, Raven 18, 2011

Designer

Unknown.
Doreen Braverman, Canadian City Flags, Raven 18, 2011

More about the flag

In The North Bay Nugget, 18 March 2009, Maria Calabrese reports:

Warrant Officer Neil Pitts asked the city for a municipal flag that he could fly at Camp Nathan Smith, a Canadian military base in Kandahar, during his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan. Mayor Vic Fedeli did one better by giving Pitts the flag that flies in his office. The flagpole will remain empty until Pitts brings it back later this year.

[...]

There is an "alley of flags" at the Canadian camp where other soldiers fly the flags of their municipalities as they represent their cities and bring a part of their home with them as they serve abroad.

A colour photo taken during the event shows the flag of North Bay as vertically divided green-white-blue (1:2:1) with the city logo in the middle of the white stripe.

Bay Today, 19 March 2009, relates the same event with a bigger photography (but not completely showing the flag).
Ivan Sache, 26 March 2009

Police Service flag

image by Randy Young, 16 March 2015

The flag is the service badge on a royal blue field: http://media.zuza.com/b/d/bd53daa6-9df3-451a-a3c2-a1d60c0074c4/Police_Flag___Content.jpg. From http://storage.thebarrieexaminer.com/v1/dynamic_resize/sws_path/suns-prod-images/1297550332302_ORIGINAL.jpg?quality=80&size=650x&stmp=1397831744812.
The badge is at http://www.country600.com/files/Police-north-bay2.jpg
Dave Fowler, 16 March 2015