Two billion dollars… Or $222 per Quebecer, including children! Had it not been for the decision to invest in the construction of a new roof (for $870 million), this is the price that would have had to be paid to afford once and for all the destruction of the Olympic Stadium, as discussed.
According to our research, no other stadium has cost this much to demolish. There was the football stadium in Sydney, Australia, destroyed in 2019 for $41.3 million (today’s dollars), or the Yankee Stadium, demolished in 2010 for $47.3 million (today’s dollars). today).
But to our knowledge, no other major demolition, other than perhaps that of a nuclear power plant in Oregon, for $447 million (today’s dollars), has really come close to $2 billion. put forward by Quebec to justify the launch of a new major investment cycle at the Olympic Park.
15 years old
But in the absence of precise data, it is difficult for experts to judge the seriousness of the estimates put forward on February 5 by the Minister of Tourism, Caroline Proulx.
Verification made: the $2 billion advanced by Quebec are taken from a “preliminary analysis” carried out more than 20 years ago (in 2003), then subsequently updated in 2009. The costs obtained at the time (between 500 and $700 million) were recently indexed to today’s cost to approach the $2 billion advanced. The result of this exercise fits on a single page.
Michel Labrecque, CEO of the Olympic Park, and the Minister of Tourism, Caroline Proulx, during the announcement of the replacement of the roof of the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, at an estimated cost of $870 million.
Screenshots TVA Nouvelles.
The newspaper has obtained confirmation that no other study has been ordered or produced on the subject for 15 years, since the last update produced for the defunct Olympic Installations Authority (RIO) in 2009. How is this possible?
- Listen to the interview with François Delaney, designer and president of Delaney technologies, via QUB :
The management of the Olympic Park (which replaced the RIO) refused to grant us an interview. Through its spokesperson, the organization defends itself by maintaining that it never really had the government’s mandate to demolish the stadium nor to push its research further in order to know the fine details of the demolition option, which had – in any case – never been favored by Quebec.
Not optimal
A situation that surprises UQAM professor and co-holder of the Chair of Project Management, Alejandro Romero-Torres. Without condemning the absence of more recent studies, he affirms that the situation “is not optimal”.
The document provided by the Olympic Park to justify the estimate of 2 billion necessary for the destruction of the Olympic stadium
Courtesy: Olympic Park
Relying on past data to make current decisions is not completely useless. But good practices in this area require, he says, never to deprive oneself of recent cost evaluations in order to have all the data necessary to make a good decision.
All the more so, he adds, as the chances are great that 20 years later, demolition methods will have changed and generally with the effect of lowering costs.
A botched study?
MP Marwah Rizqy, liberal infrastructure critic, admits to having had the same surprise when receiving a table of a few lines, taking up a single page, after having requested the study of the demolition costs at $2 billion, mentioned by Minister Proulx the previous week.
“Excuse me, but this lacks seriousness and respect for the population. We would at least be entitled to expect that a government which is about to incur such expenses would do better than simply index the results of a study produced 20 years earlier.”
Marwah Rizqy, liberal MP.
Stevens LeBlanc/JOURNAL DE QUEBEC
The MP believes that “such a methodological shortcut” by Ministers Proulx and Jonatan Julien (Infrastructures) “is laughable and unworthy” of the role of parliamentarian. “I can assure you that when I was teaching at university, if a student had given me such work, I would not have hesitated to reproach him for his intellectual laziness.”
Delicate operation
In any case, for the professor of civil engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, Bruno Massicotte, there is no doubt that the demolition of the Stadium would constitute a “delicate operation”, mainly due to the nature of the work – the building being composed largely of pre-stressed concrete – and the proximity of surrounding infrastructure to be preserved (the Saputo stadium, cinemas, the biodome, etc.)
Is $2 billion overkill? The latter cannot comment with precision, but estimates that such an operation could very well exceed a billion and a half dollars. “Things would be different if the stadium was in the middle of nowhere. But given all the particularities we are dealing with (starting with a line and two metro stations in the basement), this requires a piece by piece demolition which could take several years.”
-With the collaboration of Charles Mathieu, Yves Lévesque, Jean-Louis Fortin and Anouk Lebel.