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Charles Bronfman, the original owner of the Expos, was to be inducted into the Montreal Jewish Sports Hall of Fame at the YM-YWHA on Monday night.

Here is some of what he had to say during a 20-minute phone interview with the Montreal Gazette from New York on Monday morning before catching an afternoon flight here for the induction ceremony:

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Could a new Major League Baseball team work in Montreal without a retractable roof on a new downtown stadium?

“No. It’s mandatory. Because if, please God, you played in October and the beginning of November. … The same is true at the beginning of the season. But it’s got to be open because in a cold-weather climate you huddle indoors all winter, then when the spring comes and the summer comes you want to be outside and you also want to have a stadium that says it’s summer. The Olympic Stadium said: ‘We’re a big hulking slob of concrete, or slab of concrete.’ In fact, the concrete association condemned it. And it was just not conducive to playing what is really a summer sport.”