LAVAL — A golf clubhouse fire causing more than $2 million worth of damage has been classified as arson by police. There was no one injured in the blaze.
Firefighters received a call shortly after Le Cardinal golf club closed at 10:30 p.m. Monday. When they arrived at the scene, they smelled fumes.
“Flames were just shooting out of the building. When they got here, they smelled some kind of accellerant,” said Constable Frank di Genova, of Laval Police. “They believe it’s gasoline.”
It took about 50 firefighters most of the night to get the fire out. Police may have a difficult time deducing the motive and finding leads on suspects. The clubhouse had a video surveillance system, but it appears that the videos were stored on-site, and could have gone up in the blaze.
Owner Guy Cardinal said the fire and its motives escape him – the worst problem he could remember at the clubhouse was simply keeping a tipsy patron from driving home after dining at the restaurant.
“We don’t open at night. There’s no bar,” he said. “It’s very hard to believe why it went up like that.”
The club is a family-run business founded by Cardinal’s father Maurice on the site of a public course. It was built in 1955 at a time when golf was still considered the domain of a privileged subset of society.
“At that time there were only private golf clubs in Laval, and he believed that a public golf club was a good business,” the younger Cardinal said.
Cardinal said the course will continue to operate, though the clubhouse won’t be rebuilt before the summer’s over. The clubhouse generates more than $8,000 a day, and about a dozen employees lost their jobs because of the fire.
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