The swimming pool at Cégep de La Pocatière, the only indoor pool located between the 130 km separating Montmagny and Rivière-du-Loup, is in danger of closing its doors permanently due to its dilapidated condition and the lack of government financial support to ensure its renovation.
The population of La Pocatière and the surrounding area, already deprived of their indoor pool since the temporary closure decreed in spring 2023, now risks losing it for good. Lacking the means to renovate it, the management of the CEGEP “is forced” to recommend its definitive condemnation, it indicates in a press release.
The board of directors must decide on his fate in September.
“The pool is finished,” laments Marie-Claude Deschênes, the general director of the Cégep de La Pocatière. “If I have water damage, I’ll flood the entire student population!”
The pool, built in 1961, needs a major makeover to continue its activities. The CEGEP had submitted an initial request for assistance in 2021 — which the Ministry of Higher Education (MES) took 21 months to satisfy by promising a sum of $1.5 million in March 2023.
This amount was in addition to the approximately $4.3 million received under the School and Higher Education Sports and Recreation Infrastructure Support Program. This kitty, enhanced by the injection of $770,000 by the CEGEP, was to cover all costs.
However, technical constraints and the inflationary context inherited from the pandemic have since complicated the project and caused its bill to soar, which has doubled since the initial estimates dated 2021 to, today, amount to nearly 12 million dollars.
“The more refined our analyses became, the more expensive the work became,” explains Marie-Claude Deschênes. “Our pool is wedged between two floors, with a library above and laboratories below. All the plumbing has to be redone, all the mechanics and machinery also have to be moved. In addition, the walls contain asbestos.”
On July 12, the CEGEP received a cold shower and learned that the government was not going to invest more to restore the pool. “The authorities instead invited us to do our own fundraising campaign,” explained the director general. “It’s utopian to hope to raise five million dollars in a small county like Kamouraska. Especially since the population already pays to use a facility that belongs to the ministry: I can’t see myself begging them to finance its renovation.”
“I felt cheated”
The Director General still has difficulty explaining the decision of the government and its Ministry of Higher Education.
“Building an indoor pool from scratch costs between $25 and $30 million,” she insists. “So it doesn’t make economic sense to abandon our pool, which is the only indoor pool within a 60-kilometre radius. I learned to swim in that pool, and my four children did too: to me, it’s inconceivable to deprive an entire population of an infrastructure that allows them to tame the water.”
Especially since, just recently, the Ministry of Higher Education ordered the CEGEP to continue its work and refine its plans and specifications. “The ministry itself specifically asked us to do this! The ministry has known about the cost increase since 2023. Minister Pascale Déry was even there the day we emptied the pool to close as a precaution last year. As recently as last March, she assured us—and these are her words—that the file was a priority, at the top of the pile. It’s like a bad movie and I admit that I felt cheated.”
The surprise is all the greater since, in her report filed on May 23, the Auditor General of Quebec had raised the case of the swimming pool at the Cégep de La Pocatière as a symbol of the inefficiency of planning and the slowness of management at the MES.
The Côte-du-Sud MP, Mathieu Rivest, refuses to give up and promises to work “to mobilize the community.”
“Closing such infrastructure should not be part of the scenarios,” he said in a press release. The CAQ member maintains, however, that the economic context and the significant deficit in maintaining college infrastructure “across Quebec” have emptied the coffers.
“The government,” he added, “does not have the room to maneuver to absorb the $5.2 million increase in costs for this project alone.”
On social media, users of the threatened pool are outraged by the fate reserved for the facility. “It’s unacceptable,” Internet users often repeat. Many draw a parallel between the five to seven million public dollars released for the visit of the Los Angeles Kings to Quebec City this fall and the money refused to the region to keep its only indoor pool open.
“People don’t understand,” concludes Marie-Claude Deschênes. “And rightly so.”