A look inside Canada’s most complex restoration job

On Canada Day, about 100,000 people, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, made their way to a concert stage in front of the Canadian War Museum for a day of musical performances, occasional speeches and, finally, fireworks.

For the second year in a row, the celebration was not held on Parliament Hill. It will not take place there for years to come, against the traditional neo-Gothic background of the parliament buildings.

The main Center Block, home to both the Senate and House of Commons chambers, is in the midst of a more than 10-year construction project that will restore decades of deterioration, dramatically reduce its carbon footprint and bring it down to the current fire. will bring and earthquake survival standards. The project will also update the building’s electrical, plumbing, heating and communications systems, some of which have not been changed since it opened in 1927.

It is budgeted at more than 5 billion Canadian dollars, of which about 600 million dollars has been spent. But the project has avoided the political acrimony that has devastated another historic Canadian government building: 24 Sussex Drive, the Prime Minister’s currently abandoned official residence. No recent prime minister has committed to spending the tens of millions of dollars it would take to make the stone house habitable again, fearing a political backlash as they appear to be spending money on themselves.

Both the House of Commons and the Senate turned off the lights in 2019 and moved their chambers and committee rooms to temporary locations. Rob Wright is the Assistant Minister of State in the Department of Public Works and Government Services and is in charge of Canada’s Renovation Project. He told me that despite the pandemic, a public service strike and a construction workers’ strike, he is confident that the work will be completed in 2031 as planned and on budget. Earlier this year, the federal Auditor General largely agree.

Two factors have made rehabilitation extremely complex. The first was the decision that all heritage elements of the building, such as the House and Senate chambers, the Prime Minister’s office and the Hall of Fame, should look exactly as they originally did, only cleaner and with no later additions such as broadcasts . cables. The other factor complicating the rehabilitation, which was mentioned by the Auditor General but not Mr Wright, was Parliamentarians’ hesitation about what they wanted, delaying some important design and engineering decisions.

This week I donned goggles, hard hat, safety vest and steel-toed boots to join a tour of the Center Block construction site led by Mr. Wright. The project is just finishing its first phase. This largely involved protecting or removing items for restoration, including artwork, woodwork, and carvings. Both rooms are now stripped down to brick and terracotta tiles, filled with scaffolding up to their ceilings and almost unrecognizable. The painted linen ceiling of the House of Representatives has been rolled up and taken to textile and paint conservators. As is common with building renovations 100 years ago, a lot of asbestos was removed, over £22.5 million.

While familiar areas of the building should remain visibly unchanged upon reopening, the first sight I saw as I walked through the high gray wall surrounding the working area vividly illustrated how the Center Block will be a very different place after all, especially for visitors. A huge pit is now where the Canada Day performance has been placed in years past.

The void left by the 40,000 truckloads of limestone that were removed is the start of a new visitor center that will take tourists under and then up the building and expand security from a tight single lane to a seven- or eight-lane operation . Together with other new measures, the center will enable the Library of Parliament, which provides guided tours of the building, to double its capacity to 700,000 visitors per year.

The new underground section will contain some Senate committee rooms, a cafeteria and rooms where MPs will meet the public, an important feature given that only 50 of the 338 of them will have offices in the Center Block when it reopens. When Australia put some of its legislators underground, security concerns led officials to do so fence off some lawns of the parliament building. However, Mr Wright said Ottawa’s new underground complex was designed so that public access to the Great Lawn would not be restricted or reduced.

Work is done almost everywhere. Stonemasons now have digital maps of all of the building’s 365,000 bricks. About a third of them are replaced or repaired, while the rest are cleaned with a process that uses laser light to ensure that decades of dirt fall off without affecting the stones themselves. Sculptors repair or replace sculptures inside and outside the building, a process that often involves historical research.

The most intense activity right now is something that will be invisible when it’s done. To minimize damage from earthquakes, workers are creating a series of temporary concrete piles to support the building and the Peace Tower. They will enable the construction of 500 piles that will extend 23 meters below the new underground complex in the rock. Between each of those posts and the building will be two-foot thick sheets of rubber that engineers told us will absorb most of the seismic activity. That portion of the project alone is expected to cost $300 million Canadian.

After the tour, Mr. Wright that the project could have been done without the labor strikes and pandemic disruptions.

“We’ve had some shocks,” he said. “But the team has been working hard to find some approaches that have been essential to keep things on track.”

Trans Canada

Born in Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported on Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

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