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But later, City of Ottawa officials contacted Global Affairs to say that taxes weren’t being paid.

It’s unclear whether all the back taxes are owing or only some.

By last summer, the debt had passed $175,000, “which has resulted in one of the worst debts of this nature attributed to a foreign mission recorded in recent history,” the internal report says.

The Office of Protocol sent a Note (with a capital N, meaning a formal diplomatic thing) “to seek a swift resolution of the Embassy’s accounts.”

Fat chance. The other country won’t even answer.

Now the Office of Protocol is “engaged with the geographic desk” to find “the best options and diplomacy tools” to get the debtors to pay up.

But as of December, it wrote, “this matter remains unresolved.”

If asking nicely doesn’t work, the City 0f Ottawa can fall back on gunboat diplomacy. For example, it’s allowed to shut off the water.

So which country is getting a free ride courtesy of other Ottawa taxpayers? That’s a secret guarded both by federal and city officials. The Global Affairs Canada document even blacks out information that it found in public media sources.

While the name of the country is redacted, there are clues.

The name appears to be a single word seven characters long, judging by the space it takes up in the typed text. (It could be six characters, if the capital letter at the beginning takes up a lot of space.) That lets out Switzerland, Iraq and Democratic Republic of Congo. Unfortunately there are some 50 countries with seven-letter names.

It has a Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it can’t be a country like the United States which has a State Department. It has an embassy here, not a high commission, letting out Britain, India and some others.

The country in question is the owner of the property, not a renter.