Funding struggle has Stanley Cup monument on thin ice
The not-for-profit group behind the proposed Ottawa monument commemorating Lord Stanley of Preston’s donation of the Stanley Cup in 1892 is struggling to raise the needed money, putting the project’s 2017 timetable — and perhaps its viability — in jeopardy.
“We’re still trying to raise the funds,” Paul Kitchen, president of Lord Stanley Memorial Monument Inc., said this week. “It’s a tough job getting these funds, but we’re still working on it.”
Kitchen said fundraising for the $4.5-million monument at the eastern end of the Sparks Street Mall has gone “a lot slower” than expected.
He said he wasn’t in a position to say how much the group has raised so far, “because we don’t have the actual confirmations signed, sealed and delivered.”
But he indicated that his group – which once hoped corporate sponsorships would pay for the monument — is now seeking government funding as well.
“We’re hoping that we’ll have balanced public and private contributions,” he said.
Asked whether the federal government has offered financial support, Kitchen replied: “We’ll have to wait for any kind of confirmation there.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a famously keen hockey fan and has even written a book on the game’s history. And Bal Gosal, the minister of state for sport, issued an enthusiastic statement congratulating Kitchen’s group when it announced the site of the monument two years ago.
In October 2013, Kitchen told the Citizen his group had reduced the budget for the monument from about $7 million to $4.5 million, which he said would be sufficient to create “an imposing, eye-catching structure.”
At the time, the group planned to hold a national design competition in early 2014 and select a winning design later that year. However, none of that has happened.
Kitchen said his group, which was incorporated as a not-for-profit in 2010, now hopes to be in a position to formally launch the project and announce a design competition by July. “That would be the drop-dead date for the beginning, I think,” he said.
If the group hasn’t raised enough money by July, “I don’t know what will happen,” Kitchen said. “But we don’t want to scrap it and we’re just remaining positive until we have something to say.”
The group’s stated goal is to unveil the monument on March 18, 2017 — 125 years, to the day, since an aide to Lord Stanley, then Canada’s Governor General, conveyed his offer to donate a challenge cup emblematic of hockey supremacy in Canada.
“But if it’s not possible,” Kitchen said, “we really do want to have this thing up and unveiled at the time of (Canada’s) 150th anniversary (in 2017).”
Kitchen — an Ottawa hockey historian who conceived the idea of the monument in 2009 — said the group didn’t want to embark on a design competition until it had raised all the money it needed. “We didn’t want to get partial funding and then proceed and have the thing collapse.”
Assuming the group meets its fundraising objectives, he said, there would “certainly” be a national competition to design the monument.
“That’s very, very important to us. We want this thing to be seen as a Canada-wide project, not just a local thing.
“We want to assure the public that we’ve got the best people available to assist with initiating a design competition and recommending the best design,” he said.
“You have to have experts involved in this. You can’t be just a bunch of guys on a committee.”
In addition to Kitchen, the seven-member board of Lord Stanley Memorial Monument Inc. includes Murray Costello, a retired hockey executive who’s in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and former Liberal MPP Richard Patten.