Far more Canadians support repairing and renovating 24 Sussex Drive as opposed to tearing it down. That’s one of the things we learned in a recent Sun feature on the state of the Prime Minister’s official residence.
The building, managed and (poorly) maintained by the National Capital Commission, is in such a state of disrepair that after Stephen Harper moved out, Justin Trudeau declined to move in with his family. Instead, the current PM is residing in Rideau Cottage just down the street while work that is nowhere near complete is underway.
Credit where credit is due to Trudeau, he was right to take a pass. But the future of the building is still up in the air.
Will it be repaired? Or torn down?
Sun columnist Rick Gibbons wrote in the Sun that “we’re a big country that can afford to fix up an historic official residence, no matter who is slated to live there, without succumbing to the dumbed-down forces of modern architecture or the miserly inclinations of those with no sense of history.”
Meanwhile, Aaron Wudrick of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation countered that a rebuild is “seizing the opportunity to put an unloved, unremarkable and money-draining building out of its misery and replacing it with something uniquely Canadian – a unifying project in a country that could probably use a few more unifying symbols.”
These are both good points.
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