Construction giants Pomerleau and Canam were awarded the lucrative contract worth nearly $730 million to carry out work to replace the roof of the Montreal Olympic Stadium.
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The private agreement was made public Thursday morning on the Quebec government’s electronic calls for tenders system.
The total amount of the contract obtained by GCPC, a joint venture formed by the giants Pomerleau and Canam, amounts to $729,312,450. With the expenses that have already been made, the overall cost of the project reaches $870 million.
This price includes the dismantling of the current structure, as well as the design, construction and commissioning of a new roof and a new technical ring.
This work “will be carried out at a target price with sharing of savings and cost overruns in relation to this target price, in a manner recommending a collaborative approach known as without regard to liability, under which the parties waive the right to continue”, is -it indicated in the file.
The contract also provides that the contractor will be responsible for inspecting the new infrastructure annually and repairing defective elements if necessary, “at its expense if they are the subject of a guarantee and at the expense of the Olympic Park in other cases,” the document specifies.
At the beginning of February, the Minister of Tourism, Caroline Proulx, announced that the new structure will be fixed and rigid, and that it will have a useful life of around fifty years. Quebec anticipates that the new roof will be completed in 2027 and therefore that the work will take approximately four years.
If there is no new deadline, the saga of replacing the stadium roof will have occupied the Quebec government for 10 years. Remember that this project was announced by Philippe Couillard’s Liberals in 2017 and that the new structure was initially scheduled to be delivered in 2022. At the time, costs of $200 to $250 million were mentioned.
Light at the end of the tunnel?
However, this contract is not a sign that Quebec taxpayers have finished paying for work at the Olympic Stadium, as experts pointed out in the Newspaper a few weeks ago.
One of them, professor of civil engineering at Polytechnique Bruno Massicotte, explained that it is “pretty certain” that other work will be necessary after the addition of a new roof on a building which will soon be 50 years old.
“After installing the roof and paying for user cost overruns, I would not be surprised if it would be necessary to add between $200 million and $300 million in work, if only to keep the concrete structure in place. good health and make the whole thing more attractive,” pleaded Mr. Massicotte.