Some things unchanged since first election

Our first MP, Currier, was wealthy and started as a city councillor

In a couple of years, Ottawa will be party central (in both the political and celebrative senses) when we mark 150 years since we began assembling the provinces into a federation.

The year 1867 was also the year Ottawa was the epicentre of the Dominion of Canada’s first general election, the writ for which was dropped on Aug. 6.

A month and a bit earlier, at midnight on June 30, the bells had started ringing in the churches of Ottawa and across the confederated provinces to celebrate the birth of a democracy.

The day after the writ was dropped, the voting and the counting of them began. Assembling the votes so that they could be counted and the results relayed to Ottawa was not easy in a country where four-fifths of the population lived in between the cities, not in them.

It wasn’t until Sept. 20 that the brand-new Governor General, in the person of Lord Monck, was able to declare John A. Macdonald the prime minister. The freshly elected first batch of MPs met on Parliament Hill, with the paint still fresh on the walls, for the first time, on Nov. 6.

In Ottawa of 1867, the entire population amounted to almost exactly the average attendance at Senators games last year — 18,247.

Out of those 18,000, who could actually vote in the first general election? The eligibility criteria varied in detail then from province to province, but you needed not to be at least three things: female, under 21 and something other than a British subject.

There were also conditions related to money, in the form of property or annual income. If you made more than $250 a year in Ontario (the former Upper Canada), you were good to go to the polling station. (That’s me out, then.) Once at the polling station you voted with your mouth, not a pencil or by touching a screen, announcing your vote to all and sundry. The possibilities for intimidation and bribery were rife, and were entertained. The attack ads and rhetoric in those days, on the stump and in the pages of the Citizen, made today’s mudballs seem like soap bubbles.

When all the results were finally in, the winner in the city of Ottawa was Joseph Merrill Currier, a member of the coalition Liberal-Conservative party. (Two words you don’t often see hyphenated these days.) Currier was our sole MP, there being only one riding in Ottawa until 1872.

Currier was Americanborn, arriving in Canada around 1837, in his late teens. By the time of the general election he had been a busy man, hooking into the timber trade with mills in Manotick and New Edinburgh, and launching a startup lumber business in Hull with Alonzo Wright.

His business in Manotick was short-lived; when he brought his second wife, Annie, to the mill for the first time, in 1861, she was killed in an industrial accident when her frock caught in machinery. Joseph never went near Manotick again.

Then, as now, Ottawa men whose deep pockets were full of timber money went into politics. Currier stepped on the first rung of the political ladder when he became a city councillor for By Ward in the early 1860s, and then went one step up in 1863 by becoming a MLA. A year after he was elected, he built a home for his third wife, a member of the Wright family. The address was 24 Sussex.

He also found time during his tenure as our MP to be president of the company that owned and printed the Citizen, be involved in a couple of railway companies, and, in 1877, was forced to resign from Parliament by the opposition on a technicality when it was discovered that Joseph the MP had been doing business with Joseph the entrepreneur.

He was re-elected within the month. A year later his mill in Hull burned down and he was bankrupt. His fellow Conservatives came to his aid to help him meet his expenses.

Currier ceased to be our MP in 1882, by virtue of not running in that election. He promptly became the city postmaster and delivered in that post till his death two years later while away in New York.

He is buried, alongside many who sat with him then and since, in Beechwood Cemetery.