Several community groups and neighbourhood roundtables in Montreal’s Sud-Ouest borough and Peter-McGill district of the Ville-Marie borough have expressed strong opposition to a gambling hall project at the Bell Centre under discussion between Loto-Québec and Groupe CH, which owns the Montreal Canadiens, and at least one municipal politician has said he is “viscerally opposed” to such a project.

Groupe CH and the Crown corporation are in talks to have hundreds of video lottery terminals, sports betting machines and poker tables installed in a mini-casino in a three-storey building adjacent to the Bell Centre that, until the pandemic, housed the 1909 Taverne Moderne.