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Ottawa as the capital






On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the Province of Canada (modern day Ontario and Quebec) and chose Ottawa. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West.

The Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (today Quebec and Ontario), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border, while Ottawa was then surrounded by dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation over the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (500 kilometres (310 mi)) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as happened in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. At the time of the decision, the Ottawa to Prescott railway had already been in operation for 2 years. Thus another factor in the advisement was the knowledge that Ottawa would soon have railway connections to Toronto and Montreal via Brockville (by 1859 it turned out) and thus access to other connecting rail lines in Canada and the United States in the very near future. Thus Ottawa would still be relatively isolated and thus defensible but yet would soon be more easily accessible by water and rail which would be essential for a permanent capital.

In 1866, the legislature was finally moved to Ottawa, after a few years of alternating between Toronto and Quebec City.

The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. French urban planner Jacques Greber was hired to work on a master plan for the National Capital Region (the Greber Plan). Jacques Greber was the creator of the National Capital Greenbelt, as well as many other projects throughout the NCR. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about 1 km (1 mi) south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city.

On September 5, 1945, only days after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents. At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that developed during the Manhattan Project.

In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350, 000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135, 000), Kanata (85, 000), Gloucester (120, 000), Rockcliffe Park (2, 100), Vanier (17, 000) and Cumberland (55, 000), Orleans (84, 695), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18, 000), Osgoode (13, 000), Rideau (18, 000), and Goulbourn (24, 000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, to become one municipality. Before 1969 and the creation of Ottawa-Carleton, the city of Ottawa was part of Carleton County. The August Ontario Civic Holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa.

 






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