Somewhere in Ottawa there is a house with no doors, because someone, at some point, carefully removed and catalogued every door and moulding rather than just fixing the place and putting them back. That's 24 Sussex Drive, official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada, and for the better part of a decade it has been the most famous vacant house in the country. Ten prime ministers lived there. The eleventh, Stephen Harper, moved out. The next several didn't move in at all. They just let it sit, the way you let a leaky faucet sit, until the faucet becomes a flood and the flood becomes a story about why nobody fixed the faucet.
By 2021 the federal government's own inspectors had seen enough. Their report used the phrase "critical condition," which is the kind of phrase you write when you've run out of softer ones. The place needed something like $37 million in deferred maintenance, and that number didn't even include bringing it up to modern code. Every year it sat empty cost taxpayers roughly $150,000 just to keep the lights sort of on. Nobody wanted to spend the money to fix it. Everybody was fine spending the money to maintain the mess.
Here is the part that's actually interesting, and it isn't the house. It's the ten years of prime ministers who looked at that number and decided the smart move was to do nothing.
You'd think, given the position, that a prime minister would just fix the house. He runs the government. He can, in theory, order a building repaired. But governing well and looking like you're governing well aren't the same skill, and somewhere along the way the two got tangled up in 24 Sussex. Renovating a mansion for yourself, even a mansion you're legally entitled to and structurally required to maintain, reads badly next to a housing crisis. So the smart political move, for a decade, was to let a national landmark decay in plain sight rather than spend the money to save it. Deferred maintenance, it turns out, is a lot like deferred conflict. It feels free right up until the day it very much isn't.
The Cost of Not Deciding
What finally broke the stalemate wasn't urgency. It was a decision to stop pretending the choice was between fixing the house and not fixing the house, and start treating it as a process problem instead. In June 2026, Mark Carney did something almost boring: he announced a competition. An independent jury, chaired by the architect Moshe Safdie, will pick a design by next Canada Day. A public foundation is raising money alongside the government, and reporting who gives what. Nobody's promising a fast build. Nobody's even naming a number yet. What changed is that somebody finally put a structure around a decision that had spent ten years floating free of one.
That's the whole trick, if you want to call it a trick. Most expensive problems in a business don't get expensive because they're hard. They get expensive because they're awkward, and awkward problems have a way of getting quietly voted down by everyone who'd rather not be the one who brings them up. The client you know you should drop. The employee everyone's tiptoeing around. The equipment that's one bad week from taking the whole operation down with it. None of it is technically difficult. All of it just sits there, waiting for someone with enough authority and little enough to lose to finally say the word "fine" and start the paperwork.
Process Over Improvisation
The government didn't fix a decade of neglect by moving fast. It fixed it by finally moving at all, and then, notably, doing it with a process boring enough to survive contact with the next decade of politics: named decision-makers, a public deadline, a way to track who paid for what. That's a better model for a small business owner than "act with urgency" ever was. Urgency fades. A jury with a deadline doesn't.
Nobody's going to write a headline about the doors going back on the hinges. But somebody, eventually, is going to walk through them.