Tear it down? Ridiculous!
The government should get together with opposition parties and find a way to make the future of 24 Sussex a non-partisan matter. They should agree to appoint an independent group to recommend a plan to save the official residence
With embarrassing regularity, Canada’s inner Presbyterian emerges, stern and glaring, squeezing nickels and dimes, tallying costs with a pencil stub on a paper bag, denouncing extravagance as the most wicked of sins.
That pinched strain of our national character is again afoot. But who can put a price on pride?
What kind of country can’t be bothered, over decades, to pay what it takes to maintain the official residence of its own prime minister?
What kind of country is it in which the impulse, in the face of expense, is to tear down its heritage?
We speak, of course, of Gorffwyfsa, or as Canadians now know it, 24 Sussex Drive, the official digs of our prime ministers, the unoccupied national fixer-upper on the edge of the Ottawa River.
The family of the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has resided in the more salubrious lodgings of the renovated Rideau Cottage since 2015 while 24 Sussex continues to moulder away.
True, the house has been the official residence of PMs for only 70 years.
But if a country is the stories it tells itself, 24 Sussex has it all. High-stakes deliberations have occurred there. Idealism and disillusion have played out.
It’s been the scene of domestic dramas, love and heartbreak, break and enters.
Like a Canadian Taj Mahal, the house was built on love, constructed in 1868 by Vermont lumber magnate Joseph Currier as a wedding gift for his third wife, Hannah Wright.
Though no strain of Welsh appears in the couple’s ancestry, Currier named it Gorffwyfsa, which means “resting place.”
After the couple died, Currier’s son sold it to businessman and parliamentarian William C. Edwards.
At the time, the society columnist Amaryllis called it “a beautiful stone residence set like Earnscliffe on a bluff overhanging the Ottawa River, just at the gates of Rideau Hall.” As the agents say: Location! Location! Location!
Enter the federal government. In 1943, the feds expropriated the property and it was heavily remodelled to make it the official prime ministerial residence. In 1951 Louis St. Laurent became the first PM to live there.
But as the Star has recently detailed, 24 Sussex is falling apart. Governments won’t spend the money needed to bring it into the 21st century, or even to do routine maintenance. “No prime minister wants to spend a penny of taxpayer dollars on upkeeping that house,” Justin Trudeau has said.
The National Capital Commission, which is responsible for official residences, says it would cost $36.6 million to properly restore 24 Sussex.
Demolishing it and rebuilding from scratch would cost even more — $40 million.
The problem is the politicians simply won’t make a decision, and so 24 Sussex is crumbling away.
It’s time to take the matter out of the hands of politicians too timid to do the needful.
The government should get together with the opposition parties and find a way to make the future of 24 Sussex a non-partisan matter.
They should agree to appoint an independent group to recommend a plan to save the official residence and do the work needed to make it a place worthy of a nation that respects its own history.
They should agree not to indulge in cheap finger-pointing when the bills come in.
They should certainly not let it deteriorate to the point where tearing the whole thing down might become the only realistic option.
Demolition is the option of surrender. The choice, as Oscar Wilde famously said, of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.