Vicky Mochama is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
I never thought I’d be fortunate enough to be able to put my country’s government on solid footing. After all, my childhood dreams of being a well-connected Canadian industrialist, à la your Irvings and Westons, fell apart early. Instinct failed me: I was a strong player in twirling and tag, but apparently lacked the entrepreneurial risk-taking instincts of those who braved the tire swings.
My general wherewithal and financial position has not much changed since my playground days. Insert here the usual complaints of modern life as a Canadian millennial: the economy, rent prices, the daily cumulative costs of eating. Most mornings, my eyes have hardly opened before I’m muttering angrily about my living conditions: “Four walls? Only four? For the price I’m paying?”
Nonetheless, I’m putting in an offer on 24 Sussex, the 34-room mansion in Ottawa that is officially the Prime Minister’s residence.
I don’t have cash to offer, per se. But a few friends have let me in on a little detail of their house purchases: they sometimes write a letter to the house’s sellers to persuade them, which is very sweet. (Not so for friends who purchased condos; they were instead shaken upside-down until their coins stopped jangling to the ground.)
So here I am, appealing to the National Capital Commission, the body that oversees the country’s assets in the Ottawa area, to engage me in a rare civic business opportunity – a public-private partnership, if you will.
For the entirety of his current reign, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family have lived at Rideau Cottage because the official residence is in disrepair and needs major renovations. In 2009, one estimate put the cost of repairs at $10-million; a more recent number – the basis of which was dug up by a group of Ottawa heritage advocates – predicted it would take $36.6-million.
A rodent-infested under-renovation Gothic Revival mansion in the Ottawa River Valley environs? Having given up glumly scrolling the listings for semi-dilapidated castles in Croatia, my attention and the nation’s interests are for once aligned.
I hope many will see, that instead of offering something as cliché as “payment,” I will be accepting 24 Sussex out of the kindness of my heart, as it takes one more arduous and impossible decision off the NCC’s table. For one, it’s a fixer-upper that we don’t actually know that much about. A heavily redacted 2017 report from international real estate consultancy Turner and Townsend notes that no “as-built” drawings exist for the house. Meaning, noted Politico, that “the renovators won’t know what they’re dealing with behind the walls until they see it with their own eyes.” I don’t know what construction standards were like in the 1860s, when construction first started on the home, but as a scholar of the antique-wallpaper burlesque television series This Old House (with a PhD in HGTV from the London School of Economics), my mind is already boggling with the possibilities – and the cost. Which goes some way to explaining the 20 per cent contingency cost Turner and Townsend has tacked on.
Again, that’s a risk I am willing to take on.
Secondly, the optics and politics of a multimillion-dollar renovation has seemingly prevented much forward motion on this project. If it happened under the Trudeau government, the papers and social media would beat on with King Justin monikers and Canadians would learn a lot about Versailles. But it’d be no easy decizh either for a Poilievre administration; Le Petit Prince Pierre would hardly be able to live it down. And as for a Jagmeet Singh-led coalition deciding between marble countertops? One’s ears fill with the static needed to block out the racist noise.
Lastly, lest anyone think this offer simply solves my personal, minor and irrelevant housing woes, I want to make it clear that I see this as a communal project, held entirely altruistically and in the common interest. (Whose name is on what title deed is simply a matter for the lawyers.) In all respects, what I am suggesting is a great civic works project. What greater good could there be to the glories of Canada but for its youth to voluntarily rebuild a/the great leader’s house? A couple weeks in the nation’s capital doing a bit of hard work? If my generation of millennials had had that, we’d be in such a strong financial position we wouldn’t even need to write sappy letters to houses we wish to own.
Frankly, Justin Trudeau was right when he said housing was not a federal responsibility. It’s also clearly not a local priority.
Vicky Mochama