Canada Is A Nation Of Cheapskates
What does the prime minister's decrepit residence have to do with national decline? More than you think.
In a moment, I’m going to write about why Canadians being so cheap is bad for the country all the way down. First, I’d like to share the exciting and adjacent-to-overwhelming news that I’ve joined McClelland & Stewart as an editor. I grew up reading M&S books. Those reads shaped my political and historical consciousness and they mean a lot to me to this day. Now I’m a part of the Canadian institution that published those books. We need M&S now more than ever. I’m thrilled to be there and I can’t wait to help bring you the books this country needs, wants, and, above all, deserves.
I’m going to keep writing this Substack newsletter each week and continue to publish with a handful of other publications, too. I hope that work will sharpen my book editing skills and vice versa. As always, thanks for your support and happy reading.
This week saw the news that Rideau Cottage, “temporary” home of the prime minister, is “inadequate.” The house is small and insufficiently secure for a head of government. While I’m not inclined to argue that politicians ought to be living large at taxpayer expense as a rule, I’m embarrassed that the country routinely wrings its hands over where the prime minister lives and how he travels. Politicians need certain tools to do the job of governing a contemporary mass state. Debates about housing or travel, such as they are, don’t reflect serious disagreements over public policy or even our shared or disputed values. Instead, they’re occasions for nitpicking, pettiness, and supreme displays of insecurity. They’re silly and bad for us.
Today, Prime Minister Mark Carney is living at Rideau Cottage, just as Justin Trudeau did before him. He’s there because the official residence of the prime minister, 24 Sussex Drive, is a mess. It’s literally uninhabitable. The good news is that in February 2024, the home was declared rodent and asbestos free. The bad news is that’s a declaration one hopes a G7 country wouldn’t have to make. It’s the sort of thing that ought to be implicit. Does your head of government live in a house full of carcinogens and rat droppings? Of course not! Why would you even ask? For a long time, Canada did have to ask the question and the answer speaks to a national smallness that ought to understood as a big shame.
The cost of repairs and renovations to 24 Sussex runs into tens of millions, or what you might call a rounding error on a rounding error in the account books of a country with an annual federal expenditure of over $500 billion. Imagine buying yourself a new computer and haggling with the salesperson because you didn’t want to pay for the ‘Q’ key on the keyboard. You wouldn’t do that because it’s absurd and you have too much self-respect for that.
The public and politicians are both to blame for the sad state of the prime minister’s official residence. Politicians have at once politicized the issue. The opposition threatens to attack anyone who dares to care for the building or, gasp, improve it. The governments run by both parties have been too cowardly to expend the political capital it would cost to admit the whole debate is absurd, fix the place, and deal with it once for all.
On the public side, we’re cheap and petty and all too ready to scream bloody murder should anyone so much as regrout a tile. It’s an impulse that is both regrettable and understandable. It’s also shared. In an episode of The Thick of It, a satirical series that sends up political life in the United Kingdom, Malcolm Tucker, the government’s sweary and scary factotum, berates a minister of the Crown for having an ergonomically suitable chair.
“Bin it,” he says to her. “People don't like their politicians to be comfortable. They don't like you having expenses, they don't like you being paid, they'd rather you lived in a fucking cave.”
A charitable reading of the public and political reticence to care for 24 Sussex reflects a shallow populism, a sense that politicians and other elites are getting something the rest of us aren’t. The government wants to give the prime minister’s home a makeover, during a housing crisis? What about me? The matter is optics and associations. Spending $37 million or $50 million or even $100 million on housing the prime minister has no bearing on housing or grocery prices, but it feels like it does. A “fancy” house is an accessible and visceral issue in a way that policy over, say, defence spending or trade policy might not be. We day-to-day folks tend to live in houses. We don’t tend to buy missile systems or ship tonnes of steel across oceans, and we shouldn’t try to.
The deeper problem here is that whinging about the prime minister’s residence, which ought to be understood as a necessary tool for doing the job, reflects and reinforces a deeper shared parsimony. By the same logic we might deny an adequate home to the prime minister, we might wish to deny healthcare to those we deem as “undeserving” or culture and arts funding because we decide they’re well outside the limits of a utilitarian state. When the welfare state comes in for cuts, we find there’s enough support for stripping away what makes us a country in the name of saving a few bucks. The cycle is a death spiral.
We need a national re-orientation, what parents often call an attitude adjustment, mister! That shift begins with us accepting that things cost money and having the reasonable tools to do the job of running a country, which includes a house for the prime minister and (gasp!) business lounge access for cabinet ministers, is non-negotiable. From there, we might bid ourselves up to accepting that investments in the welfare state, arts and culture, and infrastructure are also non-negotiable, the price of building a country worth living in.
Beyond these indulgences, we might begin to discuss broader and deeper state investments in citizen capacity and well-being of the sort that makes it so people aren’t in fact worried day-to-day about gas prices, housing access, school fees, and medical treatment because they aren’t constant existential threats. That would be a more confident, less petty, and much nicer way to live for everyone. But we might be better off reversing the order here, starting with ensuring that people aren’t worried about making ends meet and then watching them worry less about spending a few bucks on keeping 24 Sussex from mouldering into oblivion. It never hurts to build a country from the ground up, beginning with the people for whom it exists in the first place.
I completely agree but I would add in a swipe at the press. If they weren’t more than happy to report breathlessly and with feigned outrage about legitimate expenditures on things like appropriate accommodation for our PM, we’d be a lot further ahead.
This perfectly encapsulates the Canadian psyche. I see this daily in both the public and private sectors. The inability to commit to the tools and investments needed to get the outcomes we want.