John A. Macdonald was a vagabondish fellow who never stayed in one place for long and occasionally had trouble paying the mortgage. Our founding prime minister had at least five homes in Ottawa. Few survive.

In 1865 he bought his first bachelor pad, a stone row house at 63 Daly Street near what is now a youth hostel. “I don’t know what you have got in the way of furniture that you can spare me,” he wrote his sister. Macdonald took in three boarders to help pay the bills.

A widower, he married his second wife Agnes in 1867. She set out to improve the place. In her diary Lady Macdonald complained the family home had become a caucus hangout: “Here, in this place, the atmosphere is so awfully political that sometimes I think the very flies hold parliaments on the table.”

There would have been a lot of flies. Daly Street had an open sewer that reeked in summer and left a residue of human waste mixed with snow and mud in winter. This first home is gone forever, destroyed in an 1873 fire. A second home, on Chapel Street, was demolished after the First World War and is today a parking lot.

In 1870 the Prime Minister again went house-hunting. He found a place at O’Connor and Nepean Streets, seven blocks south of Parliament Hill. It was a sturdy three-story brick home with a gingerbread veranda. A single photograph of the place exists, a grainy image published in a 1904 Ottawa travelogue The Hub And Spokes by Anson Gard.

The house on O’Connor was demolished. Today it is replaced by an economical grey, mid-century apartment tower across the street from a now-vacant convenience store that once peddled cigarettes and lotto tickets.

Macdonald would have appreciated the affordability of the neighbourhood. In April 1875, on being expelled from the House for election fraud, he was reduced to auctioning his furniture and even light fixtures to pay creditors.

From the auction catalogue: “One large bronze hanging lamp and burners with porcelain shade,” “large oak book case in two parts,” “one oval oak extension table.” Bidders were free to cart away the household treasures of the Father of Confederation. Macdonald took off for Toronto to await the resurrection of his fortunes.

With re-election in 1878 Macdonald returned to the capital and a new address, Stadacona Hall, a large gated home on what is now Laurier Avenue built by a lumber baron and fit for a prime minister. Macdonald lived here through his second term as leader. The place is still there, now home to the High Commission of Brunei.

In 1883 Macdonald purchased for $10,400 his last and most famous address, Earnscliffe, a Gothic Revival manor overlooking the Ottawa River. Here Macdonald spent his final years, and died in an upstairs bedroom in 1891.

Not for another 70 years would Parliament provide an official residence, forever ending the era when a prime minister might have lived next door.

By Andrew Elliott

Covid is a tale of failure by federal executives and political aides. They did not mean to cause death and suffering; these people are not monsters. They were merely reckless and incompetent in the manner of Titanic officers who kept a dance band and well-stocked liquor cabinet but no binoculars in the crow’s nest. The Public Health Agency of Canada was fully funded at $675 million a year and found money for climate change conferences but literally could not run a mask warehouse. It was their job to keep you safe. They failed.

Displacement City is a story of failure. The City of Toronto budgeted $663 million a year for homeless and housing programs yet authors count 10,000 homeless people. The City has 75 years of experience in public housing and a six-figure CEO at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, yet was reduced to arguing whether to install communal toilets at tent cities in municipal parks.

“In Toronto people who are poor have been living through crises for years,” write editors Greg Cooke and Cathy Crowe. “Prior to the pandemic over a hundred people were dying preventable deaths each year, many because of the overdose crisis. For years advocates had been demanding the City of Toronto declare a homelessness emergency and asking for additional resources. Now, all of a sudden, there was a health crisis.”

Displacement City is a passionate account of failure. It lists the names of homeless who died including many Jane and John Does. “Shelters were either full or unsafe,” authors quote one homeless person, adding: “Even before the pandemic the shelter system had high rates of violence, bed bugs and theft.”

Toronto’s response to failure, like the Public Health Agency’s, was to spend and spend and spend. No inquiry, no firings, nobody named names. Executives and political aides who could not wisely use $663 million to ensure homeless people did not freeze to death instead concluded the problem was not theirs.

At one point the City began leasing hotel rooms for use by the homeless. “Many of us were excited at the thought of our clients living in these hotels where they would have their own rooms with doors that locked, real beds, hot showers and functioning TVs they could watch freely, the very basics of a safe and dignified space,” writes one contributor. “However this excitement soon turned to frustration. The shelter hotels were run like regular shelters with bed checks and unnecessary rules such as not allowing couples to room together.”

This is what failure looks like. It is expensive and bureaucratic and pleases no one, neither “clients” nor ratepayers who discover they are financing free cable TV.

Identifying who is responsible for failure is hard. These people cover their tracks. Very often it takes Access To Information records and cross-examination under oath to find the truth.

Yet the consequences of recklessness and incompetence are plain as day. The system was fully funded. The municipality had paid experts and powerful friends. Liberals hold 24 of 24 Toronto seats. Still people died.

This is failure on a Titanic scale. Contributors to Displacement City are understandably angry. Some blame capitalism. One contributor complains the Mayor should have expropriated buildings to find apartments for the homeless. Another writes: “The City might have made life safer for encampment residents by allowing them access to basic amenities in the form of public washrooms, running water, clean electricity and fire safety.”

This is not a failure of humanity. It is a failure of management. It is the tale of Covid. There will be many, many more accounts to come.

By Holly Doan

Displacement City: Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic, edited by Greg Cook and Cathy Crowe; University of Toronto Press: 320 pages; ISBN 9781-4875-46496; $29.95