How Not to Govern: The 24 Sussex Story
Most Canadians may know it is in Ottawa but do know know exactly where it is or what it looks like. Many might, bemused, likely prefer if it was a fun house in which the pm was forced to live.
Consider the infrastructure gaps in the city of Ottawa...it's business as usual. Consider that King, your incumbent has been in office for seven years and is chair of the Built Heritage Committee of which 24 Sussex is a prime subject.
24 Sussex Drive didn't collapse overnight. It failed in slow motion, watched by everyone, fixed by no one.
- The official residence of Canada's Prime Minister—the nation's most prominent civic property—spent its final years as the physical embodiment of bureaucratic paralysis.
- Boarded windows.
- Rats and rats droppings
- Mould and mildew
- Asbestos in the walls.
- A roof that leaked.
- Mechanical systems held together by habit and prayer.
The building is simultaneously too important to demolish, too expensive to fix, and too embarrassing to ignore.
So we did what institutions do best: we ignored it until someone else's problem became someone else's problem.
The Machinery of Inaction
Here's what I think happened, and you can fact-check me if you want to waste your time on government reports that say the same thing seven times.
Someone identified the problem. Probably in the 1990s, maybe earlier. A structural assessment. A facilities audit. Someone flagged that 24 Sussex required serious capital work—the kind that costs tens of millions of dollars and takes years to complete. This was not a surprise. This was not unforeseen.
Consider the infrastructure gaps in the city of Ottawa...it's business as usual. Consider that King, your incumbent has been in office for seven years and is chair of the Built Heritage Committee of which 24 Sussex is a prime subject.
Nothing changed. Not because the problem was unsolvable, but because solving it required making a choice. And making a choice is the one thing institutions are designed to avoid.
The False Binary
Here's the con: the conversation became framed as a binary. Either you spend $80 million restoring a Victorian mansion in downtown Ottawa, or you acknowledge the whole thing is a sunk cost and walk away. Those were presented as the only options—the responsible choice and the radical choice.
But that framing is itself the failure. It assumes restoration to pristine heritage condition is the only acceptable option. It assumes there's no middle path. It treats the problem as a choice between extremes rather than a question of reasonable stewardship.
Could you have restored the facade and gutted the interior for modern use? Could you have done phased work over a decade instead of a catastrophic hit to one budget cycle? Could you have even rented the thing out and used the revenue to fund repairs? The point is none of these options were seriously considered—they were traded away the moment someone said, "Well, it's either perfect restoration or nothing."
When your only options are "everything" or "nothing," you choose nothing every time. Institutions know this. They use it.
The Report Cycle
I guarantee you there are at least five different government reports on 24 Sussex spanning two decades. Each one documented the same problems. Each one made similar recommendations. Each one was filed away.
Reports are how bureaucracies acknowledge problems without solving them.
A report is progress. A report proves someone cared. A report creates plausible deniability. But a report costs nothing and changes nothing, which makes it the perfect government product.
The real machinery of inaction isn't stupidity. It's efficiency. Why decide today when you can commission another assessment? Why allocate $15 million this year when you can wait for the next government, which will make their own decision, which will also be to wait?
The Passing Buck
No Prime Minister wants their legacy to be the one who spent eighty million dollars on a house. That's not a policy victory. That's not economic growth. That's not healthcare funding or infrastructure or climate. That's a building.
So each PM looked at the problem, calculated the political cost, and punted. Reasonably. Rationally. And destructively.
This is where institutional structure fails. There's no incentive to solve a long-term problem if you're evaluated on four-year electoral cycles. Preventive maintenance has no ribbon-cutting ceremony. Expensive decisions that prevent disasters don't make the news.
But deferring maintenance does. It compounds. It becomes someone else's catastrophe.
The Cost of Delay
Here's the thing that should make you furious: it was cheaper to maintain 24 Sussex than it was to eventually restore it, and both are cheaper than rebuilding from scratch. A competent stewardship model means constant small investments. Institutional dysfunction means deferred costs piling into a crisis.
This is the pattern. Identify the problem, do nothing, watch it get worse, then act in panic mode when it's critical. The emergency spending that results is always bigger than the preventive spending would have been. Everyone knows this. No one acts on it.
What This Tells Us
24 Sussex isn't a just a building problem. It's a governance problem. It's is symbolic of failing infrastructure in Canada.
It's an illustration of how institutions fail at basic stewardship—not through malice or incompetence, but through structure. Through incentives misaligned with actual outcomes. Through the ability to punt a decision to someone else.
If you can't maintain the Prime Minister's residence - a building that represents your government to the world then what can you maintain?
And if Ottawa can't solve a problem it watches decay for fifteen years, why should you trust that the next infrastructure crisis will be handled any differently?
The answer is: you shouldn't.
24 Sussex stood until it didn't, not because anyone was incapable of fixing it, but because everyone was incentivized to leave it for the next person. That's not incompetence. That's the system working exactly as designed.
And that should worry you more than any crumbling building ever could.
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
