A PLACE FOR PORTRAITS

There can be no greater symbol of Ottawa dysfunction than the money pit sitting right across the street from the Parliament Buildings, which has sucked up more than a million dollars of public money just in maintenance costs while it’s been sitting vacant.

It’s long past time to put the former U.S. Embassy building at 100 Wellington St. to good use. Thursday, the Liberals kicked off three weeks of consultation about what, exactly, should go there. Conspicuously absent from the six options on the table is the idea that’s been associated with that building since the Jean Chrétien era: a National Portrait Gallery. There’s a more vague “gallery,” to showcase “artwork of national significance.”

How that would differ from the National Gallery of Canada is unclear, which, says its director’s message, houses the “world’s most comprehensive collection of Canadian art.” But, of course, a portrait gallery could be a part of this larger gallery. At any rate, the consultations are deliberately vague to find out precisely what those consulted would like. Of the six options, the government should pick gallery. More to the point: It should pick a portrait gallery.

This stately, historic and central building is an ideal place to show off Canada’s impressive national collection of portraits. Most of that collection is in storage, although special shows and initiatives across the country have allowed some Canadians to look at the faces of this country’s past.

You can see them online at the Library and Archives portrait portal, which draws on more than 20,000 paintings, drawings and prints and more than four million photographs, among other items. It goes far beyond sombre official paintings of politicians. At the portal you can see, for example, an astonishing photograph that hints at the stories of the Second World War that we seldom hear: a Mi’kmaq woman working in the Pictou shipyard with her baby on her back.

In 2006, the Conservative government killed the plan to put the portrait gallery here, despite the fact that $11 million had already been spent. The government then toyed with the idea of putting the portrait gallery in Calgary, and then planned a bidding process for other cities; they never went anywhere.

This was wasteful and pointless behaviour. There was never any good reason not to go ahead with the original plan and put it on Wellington Street. A national portrait gallery is precisely the kind of thing that belongs in a capital city, near the seat of government. Let those faces staring down from the walls be a reminder to the politicians and public servants milling around the parliamentary precinct about the import of their daily work.

A country is built by people and their stories.