The exhibition pre-season game is part of a campaign to bring baseball back to Montreal, I'm also told. There have been drawings circulating which show what a new stadium for a revived Montreal Expos might look like. (The games this year are taking place in the old Olympic Stadium, built at the cost of $1.5 billion and now needing $220 million in repairs.)
The expense for a new stadium would be immense, and the location being proposed is far from Metro lines. What's worse is that all this is coming when the Quebec government is cutting drastically right and left.
No, we don't need a new stadium. What we do need is a little wisdom when it comes to the ineffacity of austerity measures.
1 comment:
Indeed. And the public must not foot the bill for this folly.
Up where I live, Les amis du parc Jarry have been most peeved about this. Quite a bit of the park, in the midst of densely populated and still largely working-class districts (most of the gentrification around here is "cultural", i.e. better educated workers, not economic) has been amputated to meet the needs of Tennis Canada. I'm certainly not opposed to tennis, or baseball for that matter, but the people in the neighbourhoods surrounding the park should have the right to determine what sporting and other recreational activities take place in our park.
http://www.parcjarry.org/?q=node/32
Moreover, it is criminal to build a facility that will attract huge crowds far from a métro station. There is a lot wrong with the Big O, but at least it is between two métro stations.
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