The prime ministers' residence at 24 Sussex, in Ottawa, on Oct. 26, 2015.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
J.D.M. Stewart is a history teacher and the author of Being Prime Minister.
“Far from dubious is its future. As long as its stout beams and good grey stone are still standing, by act of Parliament it will house only the foremost Canadian citizens.”
– CBC’s Close Up, 1958
In 1957, when prime minister John Diefenbaker moved into 24 Sussex Dr., he wrote to his brother Elmer calling his new home “a fairy place.” Nearly 70 years later the abysmal condition of the renowned Ottawa residence continues to torment Canadians like a zombie. It’s an unsightly story that just won’t go away.
The story of 24 Sussex, along with the prime ministers who lived there, is an important one. And while some have called for its destruction because it is not architecturally significant, this misses the point. For nearly 75 years it has been the home to Canada’s leaders and served as a metaphor and meeting place for the highest elected office in the land. In a country with few historical touchstones, this is not the time to eviscerate one of them.
Sussex Drive is more than stones and mortar. It has accrued history not just with the passage of time, but also through the people who have lived there. There was great fanfare in 1951 when prime minister Louis St. Laurent held a housewarming party to unveil the new property, one for which he was contributing $5,000 in annual rent – from a salary of $15,000.
St. Laurent’s 24 Sussex was modest: “Eclectic blandness, much like a shop window at Eaton’s College Street, circa 1948,” Christina Newman (McCall at the time of her 2005 death) wrote in 1975. Visitors would have found vases of purple irises, roses on the piano, and a plaque over one doorway reading “God Bless Our Home.”
John Diefenbaker’s “fairy place” was also prosaic. They closed the fireplaces to stop the drafts, changed the dining-room paint colour from Liberal red to Tory blue, and added a stuffed moose head on the wall in the basement. More significantly, in the shadow of the Cold War, Dief built a fallout shelter.
“As Prime Minister, I occupy a house on Sussex,” he told the House of Commons in 1961. “It was suggested to me that we should have a shelter there – a shelter really protective to the ‘nth’ degree. That is where I shall be when and if war should come.” Mr. Diefenbaker and six cabinet ministers later ran a nuclear-attack simulation at the dwelling to see how the scenario might play out.
There was a cold war of its own within the Diefenbaker cabinet. A Sunday-morning meeting held at “24″ in 1963 was described by Diefenbaker biographer Denis Smith as “pandemonium,” and nearly resulted in the PM’s resignation. While cabinet debated his future, the prime minister sat with his wife, Olive, eating a sandwich in the kitchen.
Lester B. Pearson and his wife, Maryon, brought some stability to the home and significantly injected it with Canadiana, including a room of the same name decorated with furnishings from across the country. They hung paintings by Joseph Plaskett, Lawren Harris and Paul-Émile Borduas – on loan from the National Gallery – along with two David Milnes of their own. It was Pearson who added the enclosure to the back patio, extending the seasonal time to take advantage of the beautiful view. Later, Rick Mercer infamously added shrink wrap with prime minister Paul Martin to keep out the winter winds.
The genteel nature of 24 Sussex changed when Pierre Trudeau arrived with a splash in 1968. There were dinners, long chats over Scotch, occasional cigars. The prime minister infused the energy of the decade into the residence. The Canadiana Room? Gone. Turned into “a go-go palace with long-haired musicians and revolving lights,” Helen Worthington wrote in the Toronto Star.
Mr. Trudeau’s most famous addition, however, was the pool. Built in 1975 at the prime minister’s insistence – he told Liberal Party fixer Keith Davey that it “was a biological necessity” – the pool caused a major ruckus because of the cost. But it instantly became the jewel in the crown. When prime minister Joe Clark held a get-together after John Diefenbaker’s funeral in 1979, everyone went right for the pool to check it out.
The post-Trudeau era featured mostly redecorating or urgent repairs. These enraptured the media, which ran regular stories about expenses and filed endless access-to-information requests. Prime minister John Turner was so horrified by what needed to be done, he asked for a report. It called for $600,000 of work. When Brian Mulroney became PM, he would authorize only $100,000, citing the media’s “well-known proclivity for items of titillation.”
There is plenty of blame to go around in this saga. Even Jean Chrétien admitted to me in 2017 that “we all made a mistake. We all did virtually the same thing,” referring to the indifference shown to the residence and its need for repairs. But two prime ministers in particular must bear most of the responsibility.
One is Stephen Harper, who was asked in 2006 to delay his move into the residence so that essential repairs could be carried out. He refused at a critical moment.
The other is Justin Trudeau, who, in 2015, decided not to move into the place originally called “Gorffwysfa,” Welsh for “place of rest.” He has done nothing since to solve the problem (though the family happily still used the pool). One wonders if some of the Prime Minister’s reticence to do anything is that the home haunts him still as the place where his parents’ difficult marriage disintegrated.
This lack of leadership has left these historic grounds, with a lineage to virtually every prime minister since 1951, in their current state. Blame will not get 24 Sussex Dr. resuscitated, however. Courage, some political capital, and common sense will. As for the enormous costs, that is a red herring that brings to mind Oscar Wilde, who once said that “a cynic is a person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”
Ironically, it was the Prime Minister’s father who was the last PM to take the residence seriously. After visiting 10 Downing St. in 1972, Pierre Trudeau remarked: “Why should [Sussex] be a shabby place? It shouldn’t be – it’s the showplace of Canada and to leaders abroad.”
The time for words and reports is over. Let’s take our past seriously. Fix this historic place.