Mr. Scheer builds his dream house
Canadian taxpayers are shocked, shocked to find out that Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has wasted their hard-earned money on trifles at magnificent Castle Stornoway in Ottawa. There he dwells at the expense of poor-but-honest citizens with his new corallined chimney and majestical roof fretted with golden fire.
For Scheer is spending what could add up to 100,000 taxpayer dollars on his free and fancy mansion, the Globe and Mail reports, though not in those words, after torching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for buying trinkets at his official country cottage at Harrington Lake.
When Scheer was Speaker of the House — he has scarcely done a thing we minions didn’t pay for — he lived at “the Farm” in the Gatineau Hills. In 2011-12, he (as in National Capital Commission) spent $23,000 on an interior/ exterior paint job, $12,000 on new countertops, sinks and faucets, and $9,000 repairing the veranda. The Globe reported this without glee. I don’t know how they managed it.
And now he has ordered a new roof and a major repair to one of the chimneys at Stornoway. But the place doesn’t need curb appeal; it’s not as if anyone’s buying it. Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about unnecessary renos, asking piercing questions about people “painting their outward walls so costly gay. Why so large cost, having so short a lease, did they upon their fading mansion spend?”
Scheer didn’t read it, being still busted up over the Trudeau family’s swing set. He apparently still does not understand that the PM bought the swings at Harrington Lake with his own money, the installation being done by the NCC because it got more complicated, as all renos do, let me tell you.
The PMO didn’t retaliate then or now. It merely stated that “unlike Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives,” it won’t indulge in personal attacks over the maintenance of the government’s various dwellings.
The prime minister did not say it takes one to know one. Nor did he say that everything Scheer says bounces off him and sticks back on Scheer. He didn’t even say nah nah nah nah nah. (I’m the one saying that.) The word “hypocrite” was not used, except by me right now.
But Scheer, a glutton for punishment, Mr. Hoist with his Own Petard, could not shut up. His spokesperson said the Stornoway reno was “standard upgrades to maintain the function and safety of the residence. They are in no way comparable to the luxury items the PM installed … for his own personal enjoyment at taxpayers’ expense.”
At this, I haul out the big guns. For what is a luxury and what is a necessity?
Grooming the snow trails at Harrington Lake is a necessity, as you learn when you invite your guests to do some gentle cross-country and they find themselves becoming a fixture, a snowy undermount locked in place. Maybe they waxed wrong.
As all parents rapidly learn, a swing set is a necessity too, whether in the park or the backyard.
Now we come to Scheer’s chimney. I own a fireplace. I know my fireplace. And you, sir, do not need a fireplace. Nobody does. It is a fire hazard, a polluter, and an assault on the finances. It must be twice-yearly de-stripped of toxic resin, requires special glass cleaner that eats skin, and needs a second screen to keep toddlers away from hot metal.
On the bright side, it looks pretty. But a politician devoted to every last dime of the taxpayers’ money would have deleted the extra chimney or let the thing collapse of its own weight on the same windy day that damaged the roof.
To save us money, Scheer might have done the work himself. I can climb a ladder. I can tuckpoint. I know roofers who would have done it for cheaper. And by the way, nobody needs a veranda. You can sit indoors. I do.
And those new countertops had better be Formica, which proved its worth in Second World War hangars and came of age in 1950s kitchens. “Whenever I think of surfaces,” a perky housewife would say in a magazine ad, “I think of Formica.”
I wish Scheer would stop. He’s illsuited to petty, vindictive remarks about household whatnots. He’s getting bad advice and he should take mine instead.