With costs spiralling up and no end in sight to the spending, the Coalition Avenir Québec has killed off its much-promoted development. The opposition says it was a bad idea from the start.
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It’s the end of the line for the Legault government’s vision of a network of nationalist museums, the Espace bleu, scattered across Quebec.
Personally launched by Premier François Legault at a ceremony in June 2021, financial realities have caught up with the concept, leaving Culture and Communications Minister Mathieu Lacombe no choice but to shelve the multimilllion-dollar project for good.
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“Given the current context of public finances, it is the pragmatic and responsible decision to make,” Lacombe said in a statement to the Montreal Gazette on Tuesday. “With this decision, the objective remains the same: ensuring our culture shines all over Quebec.”
The government had initially allocated $259 million, which was supposed to lead to the creation of 17 Espace bleu museums in all regions of Quebec. The plan was to renovate and make use of existing heritage buildings.
At the time, the government said the new network of museums would convince Quebecers to forget about travelling and instead stay home and visit the museums, which would be devoted to Quebec culture and history.
Legault said the new spaces would “celebrate the pride of being Quebecers” in all aspects of life, from movie-making to hockey. He said the spaces would be popular and modern and not dusty, boring places reserved for elites.
“I want people to feel pride from the moment they set foot in them,” Legault said.
He insisted they would not compete with existing museums and would instead act in a complementary way.
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But Lacombe, who made the announcement that the plan was being scrapped in an interview with Le Soleil, said exploding construction costs killed the dream. The initial amount Quebec was willing to devote to create the network proved far too low.
He insisted the exercise has not been a waste of time or money. Four of the 17 projects, in various stages of development, will be completed in some to-be-determined form but minus the Espace bleu title, which is set to disappear.
Of the four, the closest to completion is the museum going into the Camille-Roy building of the old Séminaire de Québec. A total of $47. 3 million has been spent out of a budget that has soared to $92 million, officials said.
Another $21.2 million was been slated to move — because of erosion — and transform the villa Frederick-James in Percé in the Gaspé. That work is supposed to be completed by the spring of 2024.
Quebec spent $3.7 million acquiring the old courthouse in Amos, but the work to restore the inside of the building had yet to start.
The former Petites-Franciscaines convent in Baie-Saint-Paul was purchased for $2.5 million. Total cost of the project to restore the building would have been $56 million under the original plan, but the work has not started.
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“I will soon announce a major cultural project on the site of the Séminaire de Québec,” Lacombe said, denying any of the sites will become white elephants.
As for the other three sites, Lacombe said he has mandated the three MNAs in the regions concerned — Suzanne Blais (Abitibi-Ouest), Karianne Bourassa (Charlevoix-Côte-de-Beaupré) and Stéphane Sainte-Croix (Gaspé) — to consult local officials to “define the best use of their buildings.”
But the opposition parties cried foul, describing the Espace bleu plan as poorly thought out from the start.
Parti Québécois MNA Pascal Bérubé noted it was a bad idea to want to create a parallel museum system because existing museums are already struggling financially. Time and money have been lost, he said.
Québec solidaire culture critic Sol Zanetti lumped the cancellation of Espace bleu plan in with a similar decision to kill off the Panier Blue e-commerce site, which was supposed to stimulate Quebec purchases. Both amounted to marketing plans “which impressed nobody,” he said in a statement.
He said instead of continuing to spend on the four projects, Lacombe should redistribute the remaining money to museums struggling financially to stay afloat in Quebec.
“The money could have gone instead to regional museums struggling hard to stay afloat,” added Liberal culture critic Brigitte Garceau on X (formerly twitter). “The institutions should not have to pay for the fact the CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec) can’t deliver the goods.”
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