Toronto Underground: CMPX Tours Reveal the City’s Mechanical Backbone
CMPX 2026 took over Toronto this March, and for some attendees, the national show offered a rare chance to step behind the scenes of some of Canada’s most advanced commercial mechanical installations.
HRAI hosted a series of mechanical tours throughout the event, beginning ahead of the show at Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada. Here, Mark Skidmore, Manager of Facility Maintenance Operations, guided attendees through the complex systems that power the facility, including an advanced life support system handling 5.7 million litres of water across 97 pumps, with filtration and treatment processes that reuse roughly 95% of the water. For tour participants, this kickoff tour was effective in reframing the beloved public attraction as a Canadian engineering marvel.
The next tour took attendees underground at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, where Herman Gonzalez, Senior Director of Engineering and Building Projects, and Joe Brown, Vice President of Building Technology and Carbonization Lead at KingSett Capital, led a walkthrough of the hotel’s electric heat pump plant and related mechanical systems. These systems were central to the hotel’s deep retrofit, a project that earned the hotel Zero Carbon Building – Performance Standard certification from the Canada Green Building Council.
“It’s amazing for a building this old to be retrofitted to near net zero,” said Ranvir Dhillon with Masco Canada. “The systems are state-of-the-art, with a lot of custom solutions you wouldn’t expect in a building like this.”
Sydney Clarysse, project lead for energy and facilities at Norfolk County, was also impressed by the hotel’s retrofit, noting, “We don’t have buildings this large, but we do have heritage properties. It was interesting to see how they integrated new systems while preserving those elements. There are definitely lessons here for smaller institutional and commercial buildings.”
The third tour took attendees to the University of Toronto’s St. George campus to explore what is regarded as Canada’s largest geoexchange system. The tour, led by Kevin Leong, project manager with the University’s Sustainability Office, began with an overview of large-scale campus revitalization. Transitioning underground, attendees observed system components: 370 boreholes drilled 250 metres deep, forming what Leong called a “massive underground thermal battery” that stores and redistributes energy for heating and cooling. Leong noted that the geoexchange system is part of the broader Project LEAP initiative, which aims to reduce emissions by 2027 and advance climate-positive operations beyond Net Zero.
“It was incredibly interesting to see,” said tour attendee Rob Mundy with Ecosystem. “Ken walked us through not just the system, but the challenges – policies, carbon tax implications, and getting a project like this off the ground.”
The final stop was the Simcoe Street Cooling Plant, where Enwave’s Husein Amijee provided a detailed look at the infrastructure behind the world’s largest deep lake water cooling system. The facility, he explained, acts as a “polishing plant” that delivers up to 24,000 tons of mechanical cooling to support lake-based cooling during peak demand. With built-in redundancy and emergency backup, it plays a critical role in maintaining reliable, year-round cooling across downtown Toronto.
From heritage retrofits to cutting-edge thermal systems, the CMPX tours offered a rare look at the mechanical systems that underpin Toronto.
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