Doug McCallum’s vision of a 60,000-seat stadium in Surrey ‘a tall order,’ says Rogers Arena builder

It’s a campaign promise that’s quickly become the talk of Surrey’s election. 

“We are going to build a 60,000-person arena in Surrey. It’ll be a multi-use arena for all sports,” Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum said Wednesday, during an event marking the start of construction on a new Cloverdale Arena.

McCallum followed up his comments by claiming that Surrey is on track to eclipse Vancouver’s population in the next four or five years, despite no population models to support the prediction.

He later told The Province newspaper that the arena would be next to the SkyTrain line, surrounded by parkland, and that he’s talked to the Canucks NHL hockey team about potentially moving to Surrey. 

Perhaps in the coming days McCallum will revise the size of his proposal, or the timeline. 

Several obstacles, says former Canucks owner

But in recent B.C. history, there is precisely one person with experience overseeing the creation of a brand new multi-purpose stadium for more than 10,000 people. 

And he was skeptical that McCallum’s promise could work. 

“It’s a tall order,” said Arthur Griffiths, who as owner of the Vancouver Canucks built Rogers Arena (then GM Place) for $160 million of his family’s own money in the 1990s.

Griffiths said that because of Surrey’s population growth, there could conceivably be enough people to justify a stadium that size from an attendance standpoint.

But he said there were three major obstacles. The first was a lack of corporate dollars based in Surrey to help fund an arena and pay for future suites and luxury boxes that are key to profitability of modern sports facilities. 

“When I built GM Place, it was about location as much as anything else, and location isn’t just where people live, it’s where they work … the business dollar is pretty vital to the usability of the stadium.”

The second was where the money would come from, given that multi-purpose stadiums with at least 60,000 seats cost anywhere from $500 million to $2 billion to build — and the provincial government owns B.C. Place, which would be the Surrey stadium’s biggest competitor for business.

“It’s a landlord issue,” he said. 

But the third, and perhaps most important, is who would play in the stadium. Griffiths ended up pursuing an NBA expansion team, which became the Vancouver Grizzlies, because 40 Canucks games and concerts alone wouldn’t provide a strong enough business case for GM Place. 

“We knew we instantly had 100 nights [for GM Place]. In Surrey, if you get the B.C. Lions and the Whitecaps alone, you’re still not going to do more than 25.”

Eight weeks until the election

But McCallum’s comments should also be placed in a political context. 

For one, it’s election season: the mayor is facing four other parties in his bid for another term, and faces a rocky road due to his unresolved criminal charge for mischief and a myriad of controversies the last four years. 

In 2018, McCallum’s two big promises of getting a SkyTrain to Langley City and giving Surrey its own police force dominated the campaign. It forced his rivals to justify why Surrey shouldn’t have the same sort of infrastructure and police force that other big cities had. A repeat strategy could be at hand. 

McCallum did turn those promises into reality. But since then, he’s had a spottier record: a claim that he could somehow stop Uber and Lyft drivers from operating in Surrey was struck down by the province and Supreme Court. A repeated proposal to have a wandering canal run through his city has gone precisely nowhere.   

It doesn’t mean McCallum can’t have dreams. But to use a sports term, it might be seen as a Hail Mary pass. 

“I love imagination and that kind of thing,” said Griffiths. “I hope people dream, but it’s not something that I could see working, at least on the backbone of sports.”