On Monday, something quite important happened in Stampede Park, as Scotia Place construction hit a critical milestone.

The final piece of structural steel was installed, the final component of the roof support structure, and the building is considered “topped out.” Calgary Flames general manager Craig Conroy signed the final piece of steel and spoke to the construction crew during a ceremony.

As Scotia Place construction enters the home stretch – the final year before the building is slated to open – we caught up with the city’s Scotia Place project lead, Bob Hunter, to find out how things are going and what’s left to be done.

In short: construction is going well, but there’s still a lot left to do to get things ready for opening night in 2027.

“Needless to say, we’ve still got a tremendous amount of work to do,” said Hunter. “And this last sort of 10, 11 months, pretty critical from a timing standpoint, but we’re quite excited about where we are. Another milestone, besides the steel going in this week, is we’re hoping to have the roof fully enclosed within two weeks. We’ve got to spend the next couple of months really enclosing the exterior so that we can start to do a lot of the finished detail work inside under climate controlled conditions. Tremendous amount of work happening outside. You know, we’re putting in the steel beams for the community rink and hope to get that enclosed fairly quickly as we start to try and finish that. So, landscaping, exterior work, getting the final skin in place, a lot of effort’s going to try and obviously get a lot done before the winter arrives.”

As the building’s framework and structural elements emerged from the ground over the past year, around 900 workers have been on-site. As things transition from building the structure to filling out the interior, the types of workers will change slightly… and multiply.

“Yes, and again, it’s really the transfer of one trade to another,” said Hunter. “So as you would assume, we won’t need steel workers much longer, but we’ll need a lot of people, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, finishing trades that do all the detail work. That’s going to happen. I think, and I’m not exactly absolutely sure, but I think the peak will be around 1,200 or 1,300 working in the building at one time when we get into that fine detail trade work. And, as I say, there’s a lot to do and there’s a lot of coordination and logistics in trying to pull that off.”

The two big questions in the minds of most Flames fans are probably about schedule and budget for the project. Even with the spectre of tariffs impacting the project – Calgary city council received an update on potential United States tariffs earlier in September, with a $30 million potential impact cited – right now Scotia Place is trending on time and on budget.

“That’s what we’re working to 100%,” said Hunter. “And those two items are discussed on a weekly or even a daily basis. We’ve always had a target date, and we’re feeling comfortable with that target date right now. I mean, as I say, we’ve still got another year to go. But budget is in good shape. We’ve got a lot of challenges. We’re not quite sure what’s going to happen with tariffs, but we’ve anticipated what we think we know, and we’ve got that in advance, and we’re waiting to see what those final numbers are. But budget is in good shape, and we’re quite confident on the schedule as well.”

If you’ve followed the construction progress from your visits to Stampede Park – or our construction updates on the site – you’ve probably been able to see a ton of changes throughout 2026. But once the last few exterior milestones are hit, such as the pouring of parkade concrete finishing up or the steel beams for the ESSO Community Arena’s roof being installed – most of the progress from here on out will be internal, and harder to gauge from street level.

We would conceptualize much of what happens from here like a duck floating on the water: a lot of work will be happening just below the surface, or behind the walls of Scotia Place, in this case.

“It’s going to be exactly that,” said Hunter. “We’ve still got a tremendous amount of exterior work to do. Hopefully Mother Nature will be good to us this fall and we’ll be able to get a lot of that done and completed before the snow flies. But once that is completed on the exterior, once you see the final skin is in, that sort of thing, then the focus and the effort obviously moves to the interior of the building. And, you know, be it 18,000 seats going in or whether it being all the video and technology that we’ve got to install, I mean, there’s just a tremendous amount to do.”

Scotia Place is scheduled for completion in summer 2027, and is slated to open in time for the 2027-28 NHL season.

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