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For David Jeanes, an engineer and the president of Heritage Ottawa, these costs now raise this question: How can anyone decide how much to spend when no one knows what the building will be used for?

The grand old home overlooking the Ottawa River is an official residence with no residents. The building is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s childhood home but he now lives down the street at Rideau Cottage.

“The NCC’s role is not to force anybody to move into it, particularly the Prime Minister, but to maintain it,” Jeanes said in an interview.

With its small dining room, few bedrooms and limited servants’ quarters, 24 Sussex isn’t a good place to host foreign guests. Jeanes calls Rideau Cottage with its 23 rooms “much more suitable for a prime minister with a young family.”

It wasn’t possible to do a massive overhaul with the Harper family living in the house, he noted, but today it’s wide open. This is prime time to fix it up — but how?

“They (NCC) are hamstrung because they are doing it for what, for what purpose?” he said. “Is it to become a residence again? Should it have some public role? It is in a fabulous location on the cliff there.

“It’s a very expensive goal that needs to have an end goal in mind.”

He suggests a public role could be as a museum of prime ministers and/or lumber barons (both have lived there) which would reflect Ottawa’s history.

“It is a building that has other kinds of heritage value because it represents the evolution of the lumbering industry which gave Ottawa its prosperity in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” he said. Three former owners were in the Senate or House of Commons.