(Quebec) The days of the Olympic Stadium are numbered if its roof is not replaced soon, according to the Legault government. “If we wait any longer, within a year or two, it will be the complete closure of the Olympic Stadium,” said the Minister of Tourism and responsible for the file, Caroline Proulx, on Wednesday.
She neither confirmed nor denied the information from The Press according to which the replacement of the roof and the technical ring would cost at least 750 million dollars. “There is no comment on the cost of replacing the roof which will be exposed here,” he said during a press scrum in parliament, upon his arrival at the weekly meeting of the council of ministers.
“There is a business file that I requested from the Olympic Park which will be submitted and which we will be able to study somewhere in January. We’ll get back to you,” she added.
The council of ministers will then decide to give or refuse the green light for the work.
Caroline Proulx insisted: “we are really at the end of the roof’s life”. “It’s not if, it’s when there’s going to be a final tear.” We currently have 20,000 tears,” she said. A permanent closure would occur in a year or two if the roof is not replaced, she said.
For the Minister of the Economy Pierre Fitzgibbon, responsible for the Montreal region, “something must be done with” the stadium and its demolition “is not a good solution”.
The government will ask itself a question to choose whether or not to move forward with the work: “how many events can we have that will justify the decision” to invest? he said.
According to him, “the stadium can become more important and we have to do something with that”. He made a link with housing projects in the east of the metropolis and a “recycling innovation zone”.
With Philippe Teisceira-Lessard and Charles Lecavalier, The Press