It is not polite to swear at the prime minister. Members of Parliament can't even swear at him during question period, which is hardly a classroom for eloquence or decorum at the best of times, because it is against the rules and Honourable Members who break that rule will be "named" and required to leave the House of Commons for a brief period of time.
What you could say to the prime minister, however, should you be annoyed with him, is: "Get thee to Gorffwysfa," which sounds pretty nasty to anybody who doesn't know what it means.
Gorffwysfa sounds kind of like it might mean hell in some weird language or perhaps even be the name of a clinic specializing in sexually transmitted diseases, but in truth it is neither of those. What it really means, and this is probably why it is hardly ever shouted out at the prime minister, is "place of rest" in Welsh, which, I hasten to add, is not a weird language, and it is the name given by its original builder to 24 Sussex Drive, the house that has been home to Canada's prime ministers since 1950 when Louis St. Laurent reluctantly moved in.
Gorffwysfa was built in 1868 for the third wife of an American -- how ironic -- who came to Canada and made a fortune in the lumber industry. It remained in private hands until the 1940s when the government expropriated it because it feared that commercialization might blight this part of the Ottawa landscape -- the owner fought this tiny tyranny until the day he died; how Canadian this story is.
Having seized it from the poor fellow who owned it, the government had no idea what to do with it -- how Ottawa -- until someone came up with the idea that it should be the official residence of the prime minister. Until then, prime ministers had just bedded down wherever they could.
The prime minister of the day, Louis St. Laurent, however, did not want to live at Gorffwysfa. He had a bachelor pad at an Ottawa hotel where he lived when he was in Ottawa while his family stayed in Quebec, an arrangement he found quite comfortable and was loathe to relinquish.
Eventually, in 1950, he was persuaded to move in and every prime minister since then has made 24 Sussex his official residence. I say "his" because every tenant has been male; Kim Campbell, our only female prime minister, was the exception to the rule; she did not live at 24 Sussex because she didn't last long enough on the job -- about four months -- to take up residency.
Stephen Harper, of course, is the tenant today at 24 Sussex and he seems to like it there.
I'd be willing to bet a beer that no one has ever said "Get thee to Gorffwysfa" to him, but there is no doubt that a lot of people have been thinking "Get thee out of Gorffwysfa" in the last couple of years.
First among these would be Liberal Leader St ©phane Dion, who publicly resents the fact Mr. Harper is sleeping in the bed that should by rights be his -- the Liberals are, after all, the natural party of government, at least in their own little world. But millions of Canadian voters appear to think the same way -- not about the bed of course; it probably only sleeps two -- if the polls are any indication. After two years of living at 24 Sussex, Mr. Harper still can't convince a majority of them that it is his legitimate place of rest and about two-thirds of them want to kick him out of the house.
So too, it seems, does Auditor General Sheila Fraser, although not necessarily for the same reason as Mr. Dion and the running dogs of the Liberal party.
In her report issued this week, Ms. Fraser rather bluntly pointed out that the prime minister is living in a mess, that Gorffwysfa is, not to put fine a point on it, a dilapidated dump that urgently needs at least $10 million worth of repairs before it falls down around the prime minister's ears.
Mr. Harper, however, says that he is quite comfortable in the wreckage of 24 Sussex -- what that says about him, I don't really know -- and that he isn't going to spend $10 million to fix it up just yet and that he is definitely not moving out until the voters send him an eviction notice.
That's his privilege, but it's not really his right, because 24 Sussex Drive or Gorffwysfa or whatever you want to call it, actually belongs to the nation, not the government. Mr. Harper isn't the only one to blame. Every prime minister who has lived in the place has in his own way neglected it by being unwilling to make repairs, perhaps because they feared the perception of voters that they were spending extravagantly on themselves.
But 24 Sussex is, in its small way, Canada's White House, its 10 Downing Street, and it needs to be preserved for the nation and for all the fleeting, temporary tenants such as Mr. Harper who will occupy it in the years to come.
Ms. Fraser drew attention to this in her comments on her report. She doubted, she said, that Americans would let the White House fall into disrepair in the way that Canadians have let Gorffwysfa decline over the last 50 years -- the only major repair has been a new roof and it now needs a major overhaul of everything from the wiring to the windows and the cost will only go up as the government delays.
Americans wouldn't allow that, but then the White House is an American icon. Americans are aggressively proud of their nation, its icons, its offices of government. Canadians tend to be a little embarrassed by theirs -- and with some reason, it seems. It's one of those things that distinguish us from them.
tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca
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