The momentum behind the proposed new Royal British Columbia Museum project said to be Canada’s most expensive in modern history appears to be slowing after Premier John Horgan’s recent announcement “landed with a thud” in political circles and the news media.

The Art Newspaper is reporting that the government’s updated plans to demolish the existing 1968 structure and replace it with a brand new design has levied a considerable amount of backlash in Victoria, British Columbia, where critics are taking a stand against the enormous costs of the project now five years in the making.

Labeled a “billion-dollar vanity project” by local Liberal Party leader Kevin Falcon, the currently $789 million CAD ($615.8 million USD) would author a full-scale modernization of the 135-year-old institution that would leave its doors closed until the year 2030. Horgan has said he laments the project’s newfound status as a “political football,” pointing desperately to its mass timber construction and new “high-efficiency HVAC systems” as justifications for the museum’s huge price tag, which he said will add approximately 3,000 jobs to the area’s struggling economy.

As has been reported, British Columbia is facing huge problems in form of housing and healthcare availability. Public investments in both are seen as the only way out of a situation being made worse by the day by the country’s now record-high inflation rate. 

“Nobody asked for this,” Falcon told the Toronto Star, promising to cancel the project were he to be elected Premier in 2024. “It demonstrates so clearly how screwed up their priorities are, frankly, when we’ve got, just in the Victoria area alone, literally 100,000 people that cannot get access to a family physician.”

For now, the museum is still justifying the demolition along seismic and asbestos removal grounds. The museum’s new chief executive Alicia Dubois has said the costs of demolition and new construction are about the same anyway, and project director Kim Anderson further pointed to a 2018 engineering analysis that revealed “some pretty fundamental flaws in what we know about building performance today” as a mandate to avoid “a catastrophic event.” 

Securing financing for the project will not come easy as a result of the torrent of criticism. British Columbia’s Tourism Minister Melanie Mark will nevertheless make her case for the project at a hearing scheduled for tomorrow, May 25th. If approved, the museum will stop operating on September 6th. A multi-stage public consultation has been promised for the fall, directly after the anticipated closure.