Surrey mayor says he’s going to build Canada’s largest stadium

Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum not only wants to build a brand new stadium in Surrey, but he also wants to build the biggest damn stadium in all of Canada.

The question is, why?

He said it with a straight face, so we’ll assume McCallum was serious about an outrageous plan to build a new 60,000-seat stadium for “all sports.”

“Part of our commitments that we’re going to say as part of our Safe Surrey Coalition is we are going to build a 60,000-person arena in Surrey,” McCallum told reporters from Cloverdale at the site of a new sports complex that broke ground today.

“It will be a multi-use arena for all sports. The city is a very big city; it’ll be bigger than Vancouver in four or five years. We need a sports stadium. We’re going to build a sports stadium in the next few years.”

The next Surrey municipal election is on October 15.

BC Place is currently the largest stadium in British Columbia, with 54,500 seats. Its massive size has generally been viewed as a negative locally though, given that its main tenants, the Vancouver Whitecaps and BC Lions, rarely use the upper bowl.

Fans and media have played with the idea of the Lions one day moving to Surrey over the years, but a 60,000-seat stadium would be approximately double the appropriate capacity for any local team.

“We had not heard about this, but we look forward to hearing more,” said Matt Baker, a BC Lions spokesperson, when asked by Daily Hive.

BC Place is actually the third-largest stadium in Canada by total capacity, bested only by Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton (56,302) and Olympic Stadium in Montreal (56,040).

Perhaps McCallum has designs on bringing a new pro team to his municipality? The problem is that 60,000 is too small for the NFL and too large for Major League Baseball — not that either idea is realistic. The mayor did call this an “arena,” which is a term usually reserved for hockey and basketball venues — but 60,000 seats is more than triple the capacity of the average NHL or NBA arena.