Long after its best-before date, the ‘Big Owe’ lives on

KAMOURASKA, QUE.—I boycotted the 1976 Summer Olympics. I doubt the hundreds of thousands of people who came to Montreal noticed, and while I did go downtown that summer, I refused to attend any events or even apply for a job. I just did not want to be associated with what became known as the “Billion-Dollar Boondoggle.” From the very beginning, when the Olympics were awarded to Montreal in 1969 after all manner of lobbying of the International Olympic Committee by then-mayor Jean Drapeau, I was skeptical the games would be good for Montreal. And then came the day in 1970 when the budget was unveiled. The games would cost $120-million, with $71-million for the Olympic Stadium. With a budget on a single piece of paper, Drapeau proclaimed “The Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby." I kept the newspaper with that headline, as I knew it would come back to haunt us all. Sure enough, with construction strikes, corruption, and mismanagement, the deficit ballooned to $310-million, then to $1.5-billion. The legacy of the Games was a crushing debt and a ridiculous stadium design never tested in Canada’s climate and unsuitable to baseball or football. To make matters worse, it was half an hour by subway from downtown Montreal. I feared Drapeau would screw up. Even though I loved Expo 67, which was his brainchild, he was suffering from incredible hubris after that triumph. In the 1970 civic election, which took place during the October Crisis, Drapeau pressed then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act. It was Drapeau who called his opponents “terrorists,” and had many thrown in in jail. Drapeau was famous for ignoring the city’s infrastructure, saying “No one comes to great cities to see their sewers.” Drapeau also had a bizarre obsession with towers: he wanted to build a tower on Mount Royal, then tried to borrow the Eiffel Tower for Expo. He finally settled on the tower at the Olympic stadium, which was not finished for the Olympics. The 556-foot-high leaning tower stood half-finished until 1987. The stadium’s legacy has only been bleak: the debt was paid off in 2006, 30 years after the Olympics. With interest, the total came to about $3-billion, a whopping sum that could have paid for any number of public projects. The Montreal Expos played their last season in 2004 before moving to Washington, D.C., mainly because they could not attract crowds to the Olympic Stadium. The Montreal Alouettes folded due to sparse crowds, then came back, only to leave for the friendly confines of downtown Molson Stadium. In 1991, a 55-tonne chunk of the roof fell after support beams snapped. And the roof collapsed in the winter of 1999 as workers were setting up for an auto show. All of this is background for the latest promise from Quebec Premier François Legault. He told reporters last week the Olympic Stadium should be repaired and get a new roof: “We’re already working to see which kind of proposals we can have to replace it.” His rationale? “There are plenty of French people, among others, who want to see the Olympic Stadium when they come to Montreal.” The cost of replacing the roof was estimated to be $250-million in 2017. The cost of a required new technical ring at the top of the stadium would be at least double that. Studies at the time estimated it would cost around $700-million to demolish the stadium, even though dozens of stadiums in the United States have been dismantled easily in the last few decades. We can now expect cash-strapped Quebec taxpayers to foot a bill of at least $750-million to repair a stadium without a sports tenant to host trade shows and monster truck events while remaining empty half the year. This while the Coalition Avenir Québec government increases tuition at Quebec’s English universities to balance a so-called “deficit” of $110-million with the rest of Canada. Legault told reporters last week, “I want that the Olympic Stadium become again a positive symbol.” Of course, it will always be a symbol for Quebec—of corruption, overspending, flawed design, incompetence, and hubris. Andrew Caddell is retired from Global Affairs Canada, where he was a senior policy adviser. He previously worked as an adviser to Liberal governments. He is a town councillor in Kamouraska, Que. He can be reached at pipson52@hotmail.com. The Hill Times

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Long after its best-before date, the ‘Big Owe’ lives on

Quebec Premier François Legault says he wants a new roof and new lease on life for the Montreal Olympic Stadium.

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