24 Sussex Dive

Louis and Jeanne St‑Laurent packed up their Ottawa apartment in late April 1951 and moved into 24 Sussex Drive, ten months after the lumber magnate Joseph Merrill Currier’s old house along the Ottawa River was chosen as the official residence of the prime minister. Despite a $600,000 tab for the purchase and renovation of the property, and despite the $5,000 the St‑Laurents would pay in annual rent, the “gracious and dignified mansion” that the Globe and Mail inanely compared to 10 Downing in London and to the White House in Washington had an electric doorbell that didn’t work. Talk about foreshadowing.

By the time John and Olive Diefenbaker moved into 24 Sussex, in the summer of 1957, a fence had been built around the grounds, which eliminated the need for a functioning bell. But the prime minister and his wife felt it necessary to install an “automatic clothes washer and dryer” and to replace a “noisy dishwasher” before throwing a dinner for Queen Elizabeth II — in town to open the Twenty-Third Parliament of Canada. When she returned exactly twenty years later to deliver the Speech from the Throne for the second time, Pierre Trudeau hosted the royal couple for a private dinner down the road, at the National Arts Centre, rather than in the “large, cold, grey mansion” that Margaret Trudeau famously disliked.

There’s no chance that Mark Carney and Diana Fox Carney will entertain King Charles III and Queen Camilla at 24 Sussex when they arrive in Ottawa to open the next Parliament. The official residence, which sat mostly empty throughout Justin Trudeau’s tenure, has now been decommissioned, a process involving “the removal and storage of heritage fabric, the removal of asbestos and the insulation of exterior walls,” according to the National Post. Like his immediate predecessor, Carney has chosen to live in nearby Rideau Cottage, “which has generally been considered too small for official prime minister functions.”

Before he left those cramped quarters, Justin Trudeau asked the public services and procurement minister to strike an advisory committee to make a recommendation on the future of 24 Sussex by January 2026. Should the existing structure be heavily renovated or replaced on site? Should new lodgings be built somewhere else in the neighbourhood? Or should the temporary digs be enlarged and made permanent?

As they prepare their report, members of that committee ought to flip through old issues of The Architectural Review, especially those that tracked the construction of Brasília in the late 1950s. While the St‑Laurents and the Diefenbakers were booking electricians for small jobs, the president of Brazil was preparing to move into the Palácio da Alvorada, a striking example of “elegant sophistication” designed by the local modernist Oscar Niemeyer.

“The President’s palace is a more consciously monumental conception, and Niemeyer has managed to give it a nobility of character rarely achieved in a frame-and-glass idiom,” the magazine’s editor, James Maude Richards, wrote in February 1959. “Inside there is a wonderful sense of space, with an appropriate change of scale between the magnificent suite of reception rooms on the ground floor and the living quarters occupying an upper floor at either end of the building.”

Richards made no reference to 10 Downing Street or to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in his assessment of the president’s new house, because such comparisons were hardly needed or justified. With its “grander than domestic scale” and swooping marble columns that appear to gently hold the 70,000-square-foot structure above its surrounding reflecting pools, the Palácio da Alvorada quickly became a visual calling card for a capital city and a country alike. It’s an official residence decidedly of its time and place, not another example of ersatz classical or Renaissance architecture, not a hodgepodge of half measures unworthy of a confident nation.

Perhaps now more than ever, Canada must project confidence to the world and to its own constituent parts. Our prime minister deserves an official residence up to the task of hosting distinguished guests and impressing upon them the seriousness with which we take ourselves and the pride we have in our sovereignty. Whether that residence is built on the ruins of 24 Sussex or on a different site entirely, it ought to be bold, inventive, and properly financed. It ought to be as acclaimed as our embassy in Washington and sourced, entirely if possible, from Canadian minds and materials. It ought to become a must‑see destination for tourists and an enduring jewel of the National Capital Region.

The Forty-Fifth Parliament of Canada will surely have a lot on its plate. But finally giving the prime minister a worthy address should not again be put off for another day.