Peace, order and bad renovations
A strange mishap will hit the nation’s capital in June. Ottawa will lose its most treasured building . . . and it won’t be recovered for at least a decade. The Government of Canada, and its army of contractors, will take that long to renovate Parliament. Of course, they will be wildly over budget and years behind their delivery date, as well.
The renovation of the parliamentary precinct began nearly a decade ago. It is making slow progress. Ottawa’s old train station, later an abandoned government conference centre, will be the “new” Senate building. Already tens of millions over budget and years behind schedule, it had better be ready soon because come June the contractors will evict the tenants and then drape the Centre Block in a massive tarpaulin.
The latest renovation of the West Block, an eternal project that gets done and redone every few years, is overdue for completion. The “new” House of Commons chamber is to be in the old West Block atrium, now sheathed in glass; at the risk of what one wag suggested risks making MPs look like a flock of angry, squawking birds trapped in an aviary.
New MP and Senate offices, committee rooms etc., have been lavishly outfitted on a series of old office buildings nearby. Noticeably absent from this gusher of tax dollars is the Langevin Block, tired old home to some of the prime minister’s hundreds of minions. Renovations are being done all around it, but we are assured it will retain its 1970s suburban rec room decor, dirty yellow-grey exterior and dirty hospital-grey interior.
Wandering its corridors over the years, I have often wondered what foreign visitors used to London’s palatial bureaucratic palaces, or the sleek corridors of Washington’s finest marble piles, would ask themselves about a country as rich as this housing its leaders in faded early-Walmart decor.
We do have a curiously conflicted view about our public buildings in this country. We are very proud at the opening of a new museum, gallery or modern subway station, but we sure don’t like to spend money on furniture, fittings and basic upkeep. So, governments kick the renovation decisions down the road and pray the asbestos does not start dribbling out of the ceilings on their watch. But, of course, one day it does. It happened to the Ontario legislature after decades of Band-Aids. An entire wing had to be evacuated and then sealed, to be scrubbed by hazmat crews. When the building’s stewards then persuaded their political bosses that doing nothing was riskier than spending, there was no end of surprises.
My favourite was the vast rat’s nest of abandoned chunks of cabling heaped for decades into a metre-high pile over the central joists, running the length of the ceiling of the legislative chambers. Every time a minister moved or a new arrival simply wanted a new decor, contractors did not bother to remove the cables that ran through the ceilings from one end of the old Pink Lady to the other, they simply cut them off behind the walls at each end, and strung new ones.
And then there are Stornoway and 24 Sussex Drive, the opposition leader’s home and the prime minister’s. Stornoway has been patched up, but still needs much work while 24 Sussex is unlivable. So, the Trudeau family has been house guests of the Governor General for more than two years now.
24 Sussex Drive sits dark and empty, slowly decaying, like an abandoned squire’s home in a Jane Austen novel. Never an especially elegant residence, it is now a leaky, drafty, desolate pile. It will cost vastly more to renovate than to start over, as any home-owning reno victim can well attest. Perhaps that is why the National Capital Commission, its landlord, continues to sit on its hands unable to decide its fate.
But, hey, we will have a shiny new LRT in the nation’s capital by the time tourist season rolls around again — we hope. Thousands of visitors can travel its length to stare in bewilderment at these vast construction hoardings and the lovely painted tarpaulins that stand where our nation’s Parliament once was.