A primer in our past for authors of our future

The squad of rookie councillors (seven men and one woman) recently attended boot camp, where they learned how to get through meetings, the politics of running an office, how the trash gets taken out, what to say to requests to have a parking ticket disappeared, how to feel about gross infill, that kind of thing. If there was not a one-pager on the history of Ottawa in their binders, I’d like to have a go at providing it in two parts: 0 to 1900, and 1901 to 2014. So the new councillors can check their rear-view mirrors occasionally as they take the wheel and shuttle us forward.

There was a really long ice age, which melted due to global warming, and then there was a sea, named after an explorer who would not appear for 10,000 years, then the cracked land bounced back up, crisscrossed by three rivers and sporting a couple of pretty waterfalls and a sign saying, FUTURE SITE OF THE CAPITAL OF CANADA.

The woodlanders moved in, carefully, canoed the river, trapped the woods, scuffled a little, were plastic free, created no garbage, and partied and bartered at Lac Leamy near the sign saying FUTURE SITE OF CASINO.

Then came the French, who considered it a nice place to visit but didn’t stay, including the explorer, Monsieur Champlain, that the sea was named after, but they took away the fur off beavers’ backs to make hats, and they upgraded (in their minds) the woodlanders’ souls to a Christian operating system.

Then, after a distant battle in 1759 at which the French side lost more quickly than the British, the beautiful landscape became real estate, and the building boom began. As the 19th century got underway, an American Mister Wright started an agrarian settlement on the wrong side of the biggest river, the one the Algonquin

The woodlanders moved in, trapped the woods, scuffled a little, were plastic free, created no garbage, and partied and bartered at Lac Leamy near the sign saying FUTURE SITE OF CASINO.

had plied for centuries so it was called the Ottawa. In 1806, needing money, he switched to cutting down trees and exporting them.

Then the British fought another war, this time with the Americans, and the Americans lost more quickly than the British. The bellicose British brought in a genius engineer to make a canal for moving stuff about, from soldiers to organic produce, in the event of another war; the engineer got canned for going over budget, but the town he had laid out by the canal went ahead without him, and it was named Bytown after him. The town was divided into two: Lowertown for the people who lived in small houses who did all the work, and Uppertown for all the people that they worked for who lived in big houses.

With the war over and the canal built, the serious business of cutting down all the trees everywhere and sending them elsewhere began. In the mid-19th century a gang of American tree tycoons and one Canadian were invited up to the big falls called the Chaudière to speed up cutting down all the trees, and they did. When they died they became street names, like Booth and Bronson. Then, because the Algonquin had been hunting and camping here for centuries, the town was upgraded to a city and called Ottawa.

Shortly thereafter, in 1857, on the supposition that if the Americans tried to attack Canada again they would never find it, the city was upgraded to capital. (Thereafter the Americans switched from bullets to bucks and began buying up the capital instead.) Trainloads of bureaucrats, a lot of them French, were shipped in to run things and the politicians gathered in a brand new big House to ease and grease the flow of money from the poor to the rich, who carried on running things as they saw fit. To help all the bureaucrats get to work who couldn’t afford to live downtown, a streetcar system was put in. It was time for the 20th century to start.