The CAQ is kindly funding the east-end beach in Pointe-aux-Trembles whose MNA is one of the island’s two CAQ representatives as well as minister for the Montreal region. Quebec is ponying up $5 million for the project expected to take until 2022.
Updates from March, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
As the Radio-Canada writer here observes, enthusiasm here for baseball peaks with the Blue Jays exhibition games played here at the stadium in springtime; it’s a series of brief interviews with people concerned about the potential profitability of returning a professional team to this city.
Fact is, baseball is declining in popularity all over. Putting up an expensive stadium here would be a hobby for a few billionaires, with the public purse inveigled into footing the bill. A stadium that would stand empty most of the time. Please let us not be idiots about this.
Kevin
The contract Mike Trout just signed is a nail in the coffin of this silly exercise. $426 million over 10 years.
The best paid hockey players get a quarter of that.
There will be lots of baseball news over the next week, but I want to hear these people explain how baseball in Montreal will be able to afford these salaries
Uatu
It would be good to see how many young people are interested since they’re the future fanbase to keep a franchise viable. Right now the only ones who are enthusiastic are nostalgic baby boomers and rich speculators.
Faiz Imam
While I’m super against the expos coming back, I have to push back a little bit on this hate.
I’ve gone to my share of blue Jay’s games in Toronto, and I know the league data pretty well. The Jays games are very full and lean extremely young and very multicultural.
In a city where sports tickets are unaffordable, baseball is realistically cheap.
This is an older article, but it reflects what I’ve seen:
While baseball doesn’t belong in Montreal, the sport is in a period of transition and I’d say it’ll come out of it just fine.
Kate
“Hate” is a harsh word. I simply think it’s a bad idea.
Chris
Baseball is too slow and boring for today’s attention span.
GC
I’m actually a fan of baseball, but I still want us to be realistic about the viability of another Montreal team. We tried it once and it failed. What reason is there to think it will be more successful a second time?
dhomas
I am fully against this project. I don’t think a single red cent of public money should be spent on it. However, the whole “we tried it before and it didn’t work” narrative is a poor argument against it. Nothing would ever improve if we stopped trying after every failure. Failure leads us to get better by figuring out what doesn’t work. Unfortunately in this case, I’m worried that the folks who want to bring a new MLB team to Montreal have learned that they need more government incentives to make this second go-round work.
GC
I agree with you to a point, dhomas, but we try something different the second time or there’s no point. What’s going to be done differently this time?
Josh
Kevin – the thing is the TV money. The TV contracts are worth a lot more now than they were in the Expos’ day, across the board. Small cities like San Diego and Tampa, where they don’t sell out, are able to sign big stars to large contracts because of their regional TV deals. Also: Revenue sharing exists in a way now that it didn’t when the Expos left (the case of the Expos was in fact part of the impetus to change that structure).
This information is all out there for anyone who wants to actually do some research!
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Kate
The most recent head count of the homeless in Montreal was taken last April, but for some reason the results haven’t yet been released. They’re expected next week, and Pierre-André Normandin tells us the numbers are predicted to have risen since the only other such census, taken in 2015.
It wouldn’t surprise me. As I’ve recounted before, I volunteered for the 2015 census, and by chance it was an atypical evening downtown. A big student march was also taking place that night, with a pervasive police presence on the ground as well as helicopter surveillance, so that a lot of folks would’ve been lying low and not answering nosy questions from people with clipboards. The resulting numbers in 2015 were bound to have been on the low side for this reason.
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Kate
Like an elevator ascending an inclined tower, costs to upgrade the Olympic stadium are sliding inexorably upward.
Ephraim
Looking for someone actually surprised by this news….
Frankie
It should be demolished, although the disruption it would create in the area during the demo, not to mention all that concrete, rebar and everything else in there ending up in landfills, would be an environmental mess. Maybe sell off pocket size chunks of it for 10 bucks a piece? What’s an extra 10 bucks to finally own a piece of something you have been paying for for decades?
Faiz Imam
Honestly, there are so many markets, fairs and festivals that we could use that space for. Unfortunately under the current system the rental costs are prohibitive, but from what ive’ read, a key part of the renovations is to make it much easier to rent the floor or a small part of the stadium.
Given how much of a winter city we are, i’m always surprised we don’t make better use out of what is the biggest climate controlled volume of space in the city.
Hopefully once it gets renovated, we can come up with more community events and such to make use of it in the winter months.
dhomas
@Frankie: The Big O has been paid off since 2006. It’s time to put the tired “Big Owe” trope to rest. The total cost was just shy of $1.5 billion (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Stadium_(Montreal) ). We spend a whole lot more elsewhere (the Turcot alone is costing almost $4 billion, plus whatever overages they can tack on).
I only wish they would make better use of the space.Kevin
We’re still spending at least $30 million each year on annual maintenance, plus hundreds of millions every few years on roofs.
And now they want a billion dollars to renovate it, after which it will remain, as always, unsafe to use in winter.
Stop throwing good money after bad and let it die.
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Kate
A young woman was hit by an STM bus Friday evening as it turned down a detour off Jean-Talon necessitated by the work on Pie-IX. Her condition has been upgraded from critical to stable.
Two men were stabbed in a Plateau brawl after bar-closing time Saturday morning, not fatally, and several arrests ensued.
Claude Grou says he will soon be back on the job. Grou, 77, stabbed during mass at St Joseph’s Oratory on Friday, wasn’t seriously injured. The suspect, Vlad Cristian Eremia, has given police no reason to suspect any political motive; Eremia had previously been accused in a case of criminal harassment although cleared of the charge. The Journal link includes video of the incident.
Update: Eremia has been charged with attempted murder and will also be given a psychological assessment.
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