No one has called the official residence of Canada’s prime minister home for over a decade, and it shows. A recent peek through its gates and fences revealed unkept flower beds and dandelions on the front lawn.
While President Trump oversees a new ballroom at the gilded White House, 24 Sussex Drive sits empty — unfit for a political leader, or anyone else.
When Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015, the government put him in temporary official quarters a short drive away. His successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, is still there.
Now, after nearly 20 years of successive governments dithering about the building, Mr. Carney announced on Friday that the federal government is launching a national design and build competition to restore 24 Sussex Drive, with the winner being announced on Canada Day next year. The restoration will be mostly paid for through a national fund-raising effort.
“We will not let it crumble,” Mr. Carney said. “We will set it right.” He added: “We’ll do this in a manner that reflects the very best of Canada.”
While not on the scale of his plans to swiftly build nuclear reactors, pipelines and other major infrastructure, Mr. Carney’s willingness to tackle the fixer-upper fits his broader agenda: pushing the machinery of government to rapidly reshape and rebuild Canada to bolster its economy and sovereignty in the face of Mr. Trump’s annexation talk and tariffs that are hobbling key Canadian industries.
Even before it was gutted and formally closed in December 2024, tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance had left the stone mansion infested with rodents; without central air conditioning; and with a failing electrical system from the 1950s, an ailing boiler, and inadequate window air-conditioners — all wrapped in asbestos, in a building perched on an unstable cliff above the Ottawa River.
How 24 Sussex Drive became both a national embarrassment and Canada’s most prominent home renovation project is largely a story about the political toxicity of elected officials spending public money on themselves.
“No prime minister wants to spend a penny of taxpayer dollars on upkeeping that house,” Mr. Trudeau said in a television interview in 2018. He was well acquainted with 24 Sussex Drive, having largely grown up there as the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Until 1950, Canadian prime ministers had to find their own homes. At the height of the Great Depression, R.B. Bennett, a millionaire, lived in a 5,000-square-foot suite at the Château Laurier, a luxurious hotel next door to Parliament.
Louis St. Laurent, a Liberal, was not keen on moving into 24 Sussex Drive in 1950 when the National Capital Commission, the agency overseeing official residences in the Ottawa area, acquired the 19th-century house, built by an American-born lumber baron, in the late 1940s. Mr. St. Laurent insisted on paying rent to avoid any appearance of freeloading at the stone house, which was extensively renovated and stripped of its ornamentation in the name of modernity.
Large formal state dinners for visiting dignitaries are held at Rideau Hall, the expansive mansion of the governor general, currently Louise Arbour, who acts as Canada’s head of state on behalf of King Charles. Rideau Cottage, the brick house that is Mr. Carney’s official home, sits just behind it.
Unlike the White House, 24 Sussex Drive does not house the prime minister’s office, which is across the street from Parliament.
But the house did host many official functions, if on a smaller scale. One study by the capital commission concluded it was ill-suited for both purposes — its dining room was too big for a family, yet not large enough for official dinners.
The cost of remediating the building, as well as upgrading its functionality and security, was estimated at about 38 million Canadian dollars eight years ago, a figure most everyone agrees has since risen.
Since Mr. Trudeau moved into Rideau Cottage in 2015, debate has raged about the fate of 24 Sussex Drive. In 2024, former prime ministers and onetime bitter political rivals, Jean Chrétien, a Liberal, and Stephen Harper, a Conservative, volunteered to lead a private fund-raising effort to renovate it. Mr. Trudeau’s office turned them down.
Kim Campbell, who was prime minister for four months in 1993, is among the most prominent supporters of razing the house, arguing that a new residence could showcase Canadian architecture and design.
Another camp has proposed converting 24 Sussex Drive into a reception and conference center and building a new official residence elsewhere, ideally somewhere more secure. Unlike 10 Downing Street in London, Sussex Drive is a busy commuter route that cannot be closed to the public.
Keeping Mr. Carney in Rideau Cottage appears to be a nonstarter. Mary Simon, who recently ended her tenure as governor general, said that it was inappropriate for the prime minister to live on an estate reserved for the monarch’s representative. More practically, because the cottage has a household kitchen that doesn’t meet workplace safety standards, Mr. Carney’s meals are cooked off site and driven in.
“This kind of endless shilly shallying has been emblematic of the inability, generically, of governments to come to ground on issues, even the most minor ones,” said Peter Donolo, who served as Mr. Chrétien’s communications director. “Why does the prime minister need to worry about stuff like this? All he or she ought to do is say: You got a plan for fixing up the place? Good, go for it.”
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