400 workers employed to erect the seat of parliament. The building process itself was marred with problems. Simon-Xavier Cimon, the entrepreneur who won the contract to build the Parliament Building, was deeply unpopular. The workers, whose wages went down from 60¢ to 50¢ in 1878, went on strike, demanding they be paid twice the sum. With tensions escalating, the employment of strikebreakers failing and the then Premier of Quebec, Henri-Gustave Joly, attacked on the street, the demonstrations were suppressed by the military in June 1878. In total, three more strikes occurred by the time the whole complex was built. After making minor concessions, the construction continued, so that by 1880, three wings of the building were completed. The legislature still met in the post office building. The second stage was started in 1883, after the parliament lost its operating space due to a fire, so they temporarily moved to the then-existing rooms of the Parliament Building, displacing some government offices, where they started their legislative session on March 27, 1884. The builders also faced other problemsin October 1884, a bombing damaged the construction site, and the government also experienced significant cost overruns. Despite that, the main construction was finished in time for the parliamentary session that started on April 8, 1886. Following inauguration After its opening, most of the works concerned the decorations of the building and around it. In 1888, a clock at the top of the tower was installed. Two years later, a fountain in front of the entrance, dedicated to the Abenaki, was inaugurated. Four years after that, statues of various political and intellectual figures of importance to Quebec were mounted in niches in the walls of the building. The building initially hosted all major executive and legislative offices of the province of Quebec as well as the parliamentary library. However, by the turn of the century, the government decided to expand their working space and moved some of their offices to adjacent structures. The first was Édifice Pamphile-Le May, which was added in 1910–1915 to host the . It was also at that time that a parliamentary restaurant, , was opened in the courtyard (renamed in 1970). A decade later, the Édifice Honoré-Mercier was built to house several ministries, including the office of premier, which was in the building from its construction until 1972 and from 2002 on. Édifice Jean-Antoine-Panet and Édifice André-Laurendeau were erected in