Prime Minister Mark Carney announces a plan to restore 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa on June 26.Patrick Doyle/Reuters
Prime Minister Mark Carney deserves credit for doing the thing that prime ministers before him have been too pusillanimous to do for decades. While it shouldn’t be politically risky, really, to spend some money to refurbish the official residence of the Prime Minister ‐ which has been inhabited only by mice and insects for the last 10 years – this country can be very silly on some matters when it comes to political optics and risk.
That’s why, for example, the entire country pays inflated prices for supply-managed dairy and poultry to placate a relatively small number of dairy farmers in Quebec, and why it fiercely protects a health care system that demonstrably does not serve the country’s needs and is crumbling under ever-increasing pressure. But one potentially perilous decision for Mr. Carney at a time, I suppose.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre attempted to make hay out of the announcement to restore 24 Sussex, saying that, “When I see the homelessness on our streets and I see the young people who are desperate to start families but can’t get a house to do it, I just think the last thing on our minds should be 24 Sussex Drive.” But the criticism fell flat, which should be taken as a good sign about Canadians’ collective readiness to take our medicine: to accept hard choices – and in this case, very expensive ones – made in the public good. Indeed, the fact that a serious housing crisis exists in parts of Canada does not negate the point that the Prime Minister of a G7 nation should have an inhabitable official residence, and that the government should pay for its restoration.
24 Sussex Drive renovation project raises $100,000 in donations in one weekend
Mr. Carney stopped short of fully embracing that argument, however, by announcing that the government would immediately launch a national fundraising campaign, led by the Rideau Hall Foundation (RHF), to defer some of the cost. According to a government release, “the campaign will give Canadians and philanthropic organizations an opportunity to contribute to the renewal of this important national landmark,” with a goal of raising “all or most of the cost of the project.” In the first weekend, the RHF announced it had collected more than $100,000 in donations.
The fundraiser is a smart move politically: it allows Canadians to feel as though they are personally contributing to the renewal of 24 Sussex (even though their tax dollars will do that anyway) and it will lessen the final bill for Ottawa, which will make the project easier to sell to skeptics.
But it’s not an innocuous endeavour. Charitable dollars in Canada are finite, and there is an incredibly competitive ecosystem wherein participants all clamour for part of the same pie. Individuals and philanthropic organizations don’t generally increase their charity budgets just because a new recipient comes on the scene, meaning that a dollar allocated to one cause is a dollar deferred from another. With this new fundraiser for 24 Sussex, the government has now started competing with charitable organizations for the same donations. But unlike Ottawa, which can simply make up the difference between its fundraising total and the cost of the project using tax dollars, a hospital foundation, for example, cannot dip into public funds to make up for fundraising shortfalls.
The other problem with this fundraiser is the optics; not the political optics, which are good for Mr. Carney, but the optics of a first-world, purportedly serious country running a glorified GoFundMe campaign to restore the Prime Minister’s residence. There is no collection box for maintenance at 10 Downing Street, or telethon to keep the lights on at Hôtel Matignon, and there shouldn’t be anything similar for a comparable country like Canada, where the government is absolutely able to swallow the cost. Joël Lightbound, Minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement, explained in TV interviews that the decision to run a fundraiser was “in response to public interest,” but anyone interested in paying more taxes than they owe is always free to send a cheque to the Receiver General for Canada. Ottawa doesn’t need a dedicated fundraiser.
Opinion: 24 Sussex Dr. could be a national symbol of our history and natural splendour
So yes, Mr. Carney deserves credit for finally getting moving on restoring 24 Sussex. But ideally he would have announced an immediate plan, an approximate timeline, and an estimate of the final cost, with the justification being that sometimes we just need to get things done. Instead, he cushioned his announcement with the news of a design competition, for which the winner won’t be announced for another year; a fundraiser, which sees the government competing with private charities for donation dollars; and nothing in the way of a final cost estimate (though the RHF has set its fundraising target at $50-million). It seems that old pusillanimity has not been fully extinguished quite yet.