Why is it so hard to fix 24 Sussex?

The CN Tower marked its 50th anniversary on Friday, and in celebration it featured a light show with swirling colours climbing the Tower. Also, the Royal Canadian Mint has released a special glow-in-the-dark circulation two-dollar coin honouring what was for a long time the world’s tallest free-standing structure.

On Friday morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood outside 24 Sussex Drive and announced what every Canadian already knew: the place is a wreck. Decades of deferred maintenance have left the official residence uninhabitable, an all-too perfect symbol of the nation’s inability to take care of its own institutions. Carney’s plan for fixing this place is a national design competition paired with a fundraising campaign to be managed by the Rideau Hall Foundation.

The scheme has drawn predictable unease over the private funding model that is being proposed, even though only individuals and philanthropic organisations, not corporations, will be allowed to donate. Despite the promise of donor caps (no one can donate more than 10 per cent of the total cost) and the commitment to make all donors public, the whole thing doesn’t sit right with many.

The more interesting question though isn’t what happens next to the building, and it isn’t how it will be paid for. It’s why it took this long, and what that tells us about ourselves.

The standard explanation is political math. No prime minister wanted to spend tens of millions of dollars renovating a mansion for his own use while ordinary Canadians struggled with the rising costs of food, housing, and other necessities. The optics were bad, the upside was minimal, and so the decision got deferred, and deferred again, until the roof was rotting. Fair enough. Politicians respond to incentives, and the incentives here were pretty clear.

But that explanation lets us off too easily, because the political math is itself something that needs explaining. It is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is that Canada has a legitimacy problem with its own national symbols.

In countries with confident, reasonably secure national identities, the maintenance of official institutions isn’t a political risk, it’s an expectation. Nobody asks the French president to apologize for maintaining the Élysée. Nobody expects the British prime minister to crowdfund Chequers. These are national institutions, and their upkeep is understood as a basic obligation of government. Citizens in those countries would be more alarmed by neglect than by expenditure. Even in the United States, the concern over what Donald Trump is doing to the White House and the National Mall stems from the fact that these things are seen as belonging to all Americans as a meaningful part of their national symbolism. The fact that Canadian politicians spent decades calculating that voters would punish them for fixing 24 Sussex reveals something very disturbing about how this country sees its own symbols and institutions.

What is at issue here is not just fiscal conservatism or even generic Canadian self-deprecation. It’s more specific than that: It is that the symbols of federal authority — the Prime Minister’s residence, Parliament, Rideau Hall — don’t command unambiguous pride across the country. For many Canadians, these institutions are associated with central Canadian dominance, or with Laurentian elite smugness, or with a colonial inheritance that still feels unresolved. That is why 24 Sussex isn’t just a residence, it is contested symbolic terrain. And when symbols are contested, politicians are more likely to flee from them rather than champion them.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s response this week was the perfect illustration. Standing outside Parliament (while living, it should be noted, at Stornoway, the official Opposition residence) he argued that restoring 24 Sussex should be nowhere near the government’s priority list given the housing crisis facing young Canadians. It was a clever line that was also an obvious exercise in strategic anti-institutionalism: he used the necessary repair of a national symbol as a partisan wedge, betting that enough Canadians have internalized the idea that investment in national institutions is somehow at odds with investment in ordinary people, rather than being a precondition for it. The alarming thing isn’t that Poilievre made the argument, It is how confident he was in his bet on how it would be received.

A country that understands what it is and what it stands for doesn’t make its politicians afraid to protect and maintain national institutions, it demands that they do. The commentary for years about the travesty of 24 Sussex has been to chalk it all up to the “failure of political will” by timid prime ministers. It’s actually a story about a country that hasn’t fully decided whether its own institutions are worth defending.

The post-election nationalist surge, which includes the renewed rhetoric around defending our sovereignty, the Buy Canadian impulse, the “elbows up” energy that carried Carney to a majority, is all premised on exactly the opposite proposition: that Canadians are ready to invest in themselves again. Carney said as much on Friday. “We will not let it crumble,” he said of 24 Sussex. “We will set it right.”

Maybe. Carney has done something smart, by getting pretty much every living former prime minister to back the renovation and provide advice on how to proceed. But that’s easy for them to do now, when they don’t have to wear the political consequences. It would have been nice if any of them had spent a dime of political capital on it when they had the chance.

Anyway, it will be great if the fundraising campaign hits its target, and the design competition produces something worthy of the site and which does not get bogged down in regional/ethnic/language politics. The test, though, will be whether Canadians greet this as an obvious and necessary act of national stewardship, or as an outrage to be weaponized.

By that standard, 24 Sussex isn’t just a building in need of renovation. It’s a referendum on whether the new Canadian nationalism is the real thing, or just a vibe.

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