L. Ian MacDonald

April 24, 2023

Welcome to the convoluted Canadian conversation about what to do with official residences in Ottawa and the people who live in them.

None more so than the Prime Minister and the Governor General, the former living in a guest house, Rideau Cottage, on the hallowed grounds of Rideau Hall.

One is a 14-room red brick house with five bedrooms, while the other is the official residence of the governor general with 175 rooms, covering 100,000 square feet of well-appointed viceregal elegance. You name it, and Rideau Hall’s got it, one of the main reasons that housing prices in the trendy Rockcliffe neighbourhood are well into seven-figures.

At 24 Sussex, where the prime minister is supposed to be living, the swimming pool was a late addition, built for Pierre Trudeau by SNC-Lavalin in 1975, and nearly half a century later, it’s used regularly by Justin Trudeau and his family. The limestone house overlooking the Ottawa River was acquired as the PM’s official residence in 1949 under Louis St.-Laurent, who quietly and voluntarily paid annual rent of $5,000 during the eight years he and his wife lived there. The Mulroneys, a family of six, paid for their own food for nine years.

The terms of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s residence at 24, as it’s known in official Ottawa, were memorably discussed with Jeanne Sauvé in November 1985.

Finance Minister Michael Wilson was about to deliver his Fall Economic Statement for the Progressive Conservative government, elected in September 1984, replacing a Liberal dynasty after 15 years in office.

Prime Minister Mulroney was briefing Governor General Sauvé over tea at Rideau Hall.

The PM also informed her that, in a separate announcement on the same day, he would take a voluntary 15 percent salary cut, while cabinet ministers would take a 10 percent hit.

“I’ve been around this town for a long time,” Sauvé told him at length. “These are two perfectly stupid decisions. You’re making a big mistake. No one will ever give you any credit for it.”

“She was right,” Mulroney says today, looking back on the meeting and the mindset of the town.

“The most I ever made as prime minister,” he says, “was $113,000 a year.”

Not that there were ever any tag days for Mulroney. When he became Conservative leader in 1983, as he notes, “I had been president of the Iron Ore Company for eight years.”

With a car and a driver. Membership in all the best clubs in Montreal and Toronto. A fishing camp in Labrador. And a house on top of the hill in Westmount.

“Where on top?” he was once asked.

“You know, the top,” he replied.  “Right up on top.”

At Stornoway, the official residence of the opposition leader on nearby Acacia Ave., Brian and Mila Mulroney were scorched in the media for the cost of renovations and upgrades, one in particular.

They had a new front porch built.

“Guests couldn’t go into the opposition leader’s house by the front door,” he says. “They had to enter Stornoway by the side door.”

While they were at it, Mila asked them to add a wheelchair ramp for full access.

“No disabled person could get into the house,” Mulroney recalls. “She had them build a ramp.”

The famous new porch at Stornoway “wound up costing about $40,000” he recalls.

In the decade that followed, he wrote several cheques for renovations at 24 Sussex.

He added up the cost when he left power in 1993. It came to $211,000.

There were fixtures and furniture that needed replacing, and Mila Mulroney was known for good taste. It was an old house, as old as Confederation itself, built in 1867 by Joseph Merrill Currier, a local lumber baron, and designed by his brother, an American architect.

But no one has lived there since Stephen Harper and his family left following his defeat in the 2015 election. Justin Trudeau, his successor, has refused to live in the house in which he grew from infancy to the beginning of his teenage years in 1984.

Why would he live there with his wife Sophie and their three kids?

As the BBC put it recently: “The home that has welcomed the world’s elite – from John F Kennedy to Princess Diana and Mikhail Gorbachev – now sits empty, a fire trap rife with asbestos, lead, and mould, aging electrical wiring and rusted water pipes near ‘catastrophic collapse’.”

The cost of renovating 24 Sussex has been estimated at $39 million. Aside from the crumbling walls and asbestos, the central air conditioning doesn’t work and, per a 2022 National Capital Commission (NCC) report, a rat infestation — predictably for a large, empty house overlooking the Ottawa River, i.e. rat paradise — has left “excrement and carcasses between the walls and in the attic and basement spaces.”

The NCC started the process of closing 24 Sussex — including the pool building — last November.

Back in 2013, the late Jim Flaherty looked at a multi-million dollar repair estimate and said privately they should tear it down and have an architectural design competition to build a replacement. No one ever followed up.

Not that 24 Sussex isn’t worth repairing or replacing. In Washington, President Harry Truman lived at nearby Blair House from 1948-52 during a major reconstruction of the White House, and no one ever asked about the cost. But this is Canada, eh?

Still, as Canadian historian and author J.D.M Stewart wrote in the Globe and Mail last weekend, “24 Sussex Dive is more than stones and mortar. It has accrued history, not just with the passage of time, but also with the people who have lived there.”

Mulroney was one prime minister who saw and made his own share of history at 24 Sussex.

One day in April 1987, he hosted Ronald Reagan for a private lunch at 24, prior to the president’s address to a joint sitting of the House and Senate. They sat at the table in the window of the dining room, with its wonderful view of the river. Only Mulroney’s chief of staff, Derek Burney, and US Treasury Secretary Jim Baker joined them.

Mulroney pushed Reagan to include a reference to acid rain and Canada’s claims to Arctic sovereignty and the Northwest Passage in the speech.

The release version of Reagan’s speech had already been printed, to be checked only against delivery. In the event, Reagan was more than helpful.

“The Prime Minister and I agreed to consider the Prime Minister’s proposal for a bilateral accord on acid rain, building on the tradition of agreements to control pollution of our share international waters,” he declared in a new ending to his address. “The Prime Minister and I also had a full discussion of the Arctic waters issue and he and I agreed to inject new impetus to the discussions already underway.”

Following a lunch at 24 Sussex earlier in 1987, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and Mulroney met the press at the front of the residence and Bush famously declared: “I got an earful on acid rain.”

It’s known as history in the making. If only the walls at 24 Sussex could talk.

What will be done to preserve it?

The residence is owned by the National Capital Commission, which also owns Stornoway, Rideau Hall, the PM’s country residence at Harrington Lake in the Gatineau Hills of Quebec, as well as “the Farm”, the House speaker’s residence in nearby Kingsmere.

Justin Trudeau might solve the problem simply by asking three former prime ministers—Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin—to act as a pro bono commission to recommend what to do with 24 Sussex.

“If he asked the three of us,” says Mulroney, “we could give him an answer in about five minutes.”

Fix it.

L. Ian MacDonald is editor and publisher of Policy Magazine.