“While there were multimillion-dollar renos being done to Trudeau’s mansion, housing prices have doubled for most ordinary working Canadians”

Taxpayers have been hit with a hefty, multimillion-dollar price tag to renovate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mansion on the grounds of Rideau Hall in recent years.

Renovations at Rideau Cottage, the mansion where Trudeau has lived since being elected in 2015, cost taxpayers more than $5 million between 2016-17 and 2023-24, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

“While there were multimillion-dollar renos being done to Trudeau’s mansion, housing prices have doubled for most ordinary working Canadians,” said Kris Sims, CTF Alberta Director. “Trudeau needs to explain why this cost taxpayers so much.”

Last year, renovations at Rideau Cottage cost taxpayers $1.3 million.

That’s enough money to cover the annual grocery bills of 81 Canadian families, according to Canada’s Food Price Report.

Taxpayers have been on the hook for an average of $630,000 in annual renovation costs at Rideau Cottage since Trudeau moved into the two-storey, 22-room mansion.

Renovations have included improvements to the tennis court and “powder room,” thousands spent on painting, various RCMP security upgrades, new appliances, wall and roof repairs, paving and landscaping services and tree stump removal.

Taxpayers have also been billed for 10 piano tunings, according to the records.

“Does the prime minister’s powder room have a gold toilet? How can these upgrades cost this much?” Sims said. “Taxpayers don’t expect Trudeau to sleep in a tent, but racking-up reno bills costing Canadians more than half a million dollars per year is excessive.”

In addition to the $5 million in renovations at Rideau Cottage, taxpayers have also been on the hook for millions in renovations at Harrington Lake, the prime minister’s lakeside cottage estate.

In 2022, the CTF reported the National Capital Commission, which manages Canada’s six official residences, was spending $11 million on renovations at Harrington Lake.

Included in those costs was the construction of a backup cottage on the property for $2.5 million, and a kitchen renovation that cost more than $700,000.

The federal government spent an additional $6 million on renovations at Harrington Lake between 2016-17 and 2019-20, according to a 2021 NCC report.

Taxpayers were also on the hook for $1 million in renovations at 24 Sussex during the same period, despite the fact the property has sat vacant since 2015.

Despite long-standing claims that Canada’s official residences are subject to “chronic underfunding,”  the CTF previously reported the NCC spent $135 million renovating the properties between 2006 and 2022.

“Canadians need to know why the NCC, a glorified parks and rec department that plants flowers in Ottawa, manages to blow millions and millions of dollars on these swanky buildings without much to show for it,” Sims said. “Why are there now three official residences for our one prime minister, and why did taxpayers pay for an entirely new mansion up at Harrington Lake? Who is living in that new house and why did it cost so much?”

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss

Mark Carney is a leading contender to be the next Liberal party leader and Canada’s next prime minister. New details about his fiscal policy plan show a potential improvement from the Trudeau era, but the approach falls well short of what Canada needs.

Over the last decade, the Trudeau government has dramatically increased the size and role of the federal government in the economy, with the six highest years of per-person (inflation-adjusted) spending in Canadian history (2018 to 2023). To finance this spending explosion, the Trudeau government has raised taxes and borrowed a projected $1.1-trillion. If Mr. Carney wins the Liberal party leadership, he said his government would review program spending and cap the size of the federal workforce, which has grown by more than 40 per cent during Mr. Trudeau’s tenure. These are steps in the right direction. But crucially, Mr. Carney also plans to split the federal budget in two and create an operating budget and capital budget. By dividing operating and capital spending, Mr. Carney proposes a less transparent and less understandable budget. He’ll make it significantly more difficult for Canadians to track their tax dollars and evaluate the state of federal finances.

Specifically, according to Mr. Carney, he’ll run a “small deficit” in his newly formed capital budget that includes long-term spending on military equipment, clean energy, infrastructure and housing. (In other words, he’ll continue to rack up debt and fuel debt interest costs, which will reach a projected $53.7-billion in 2024/25.) And he says he’ll balance the new operating budget – which will include bureaucrat salaries, cash transfers to provinces and federal benefits (e.g. Old Age Security) – within three years. But there’s a problem: Mr. Carney’s math doesn’t add up. He plans to keep Trudeau’s national $10-a-day daycare and dental care programs. He’ll cap growth in the federal bureaucracy but won’t reduce its size. He won’t touch benefits such as employment insurance or Old Age Security or reduce cash transfers to provinces. And he’ll increase defence spending. With all these carve-outs for existing spending, it’s very difficult to see how a Carney government would balance the operating budget in three years.

To achieve this goal, he’ll be tempted to recategorize some operating expenses as capital expenses. For example, to meet NATO’s spending target of 2 per cent of GDP, Mr. Carney could (inaccurately) categorize some defence spending as capital spending. Consequently, Mr. Carney’s “small” capital deficits would quickly turn into large deficits. This would also be reminiscent of Mr. Trudeau’s promise in 2015 for three years of “modest deficits” before he abandoned that pledge almost immediately after his election. The end result would be the same – more deficits and more debt.

On the positive side, Mr. Carney has promised to cut middle-class taxes and scrap Mr. Trudeau’s proposed tax hike on capital gains. These moves would leave more money in the pockets of Canadians. Yet his tax reform plan also doesn’t go nearly far enough. Canada would still be markedly uncompetitive compared to peer countries on personal income taxes, and middle of the pack for taxes on businesses and capital gains. Mr. Carney should instead take a page out of Jean Chrétien’s playbook and reduce taxes more broadly to improve incentives for entrepreneurship, investment and job creation.

Mark Carney’s fiscal plan may represent a potential improvement from the Trudeau years, which featured record-high levels of spending and debt accumulation. But there are serious risks to his approach, which include an accounting change that may simply move red ink from one budget to another. Canada needs broad-based tax reductions and federal budgets that are truly balanced.

Jake Fuss

Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute