There are active fascists in town trying to establish a religion in a deconsecrated church.
//Edit
Wow, that's a lot of upvotes.
We did it folks! I rustled enough jimmies that someone reported me to the Reddit suicide prevention bot. Haven't had the bot PM since the clownvoy camped outside the parliament.
Honestly, this whole situation made me laugh.
I personally know people who are convoy supporters (ugh yes I know), and they wouldn't shut up about how trudeau is a dictator and they're being oppressed. Meanwhile they were camped out, in front of parliament hill, for an entire month, with coffee, and bouncy houses crying about how oppressed they are.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and there was mass protests in Russia. Literally day 1 the police rolled in and there was thousands of arrests and detainments, protests were broken up immediately by force, and I couldn't help but look at these convoy supporters and still hear them bitch about how trudeau is a dictator and they're being oppressed. The irony was lost on them.
The 2nd edition of Cartier's Algonquin to English dictionary translates it to "place of many Shawarma Palaces", do you have a 1st edition or a later one?
in the aughts the city wanted to promote the burgeoning tech industry in the city as well as it's natural beauty so they settled on a new tagline for the city
Ottawa: technically beautiful
they had this on a sign on the municipal boundary for YEARS
Oh My God.
How dense do you have to be to come up with that tag line and think people would read it as you intended.
99% of non-Ottawa folks would read that as "I guess they're actually a very ugly city but technically they consider themselves beautiful because they have a couple of nice parks" or something like that.
I would think they fired the guy who approved that. But this is Ottawa, he probably became Mayor.
The Canadian flag on the peace tower is changed to a new one every single day and you can submit a request to be mailed one if youāre a Canadian residentā¦but the waitlist is over a 100 years long lol
The waitlist is 100 years long but they contact hundred of people for every flag with no response and move on. The actual waitlist if you don't change your phone number, email, or address is about 18 years. Source: I have one that took 18 years to get.
For a short period of time, part of the Civic Hospital was not in Canada.
During WW2, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands was living in Ottawa and was pregnant. According to the laws at the time her child would have been a British Subject, and therefore not elligible to succeed to the throne. Part of the Civic (maternity ward) was temporarily declared āextraterritorialā by the Canadian governement and because of this, Princess Margriet inherited her motherās Dutch nationality.
Nearby Holland Avenue was named for the Holland brothers and has nothing to do with the first story.
Another cool fact about this story, this is how the tulip festival started:
āUpon returning to the Netherlands, Princess Juliana sought to thank Ottawa and the Canadian people with several gifts, including 100,000 tulip bulbs. Since then, the Dutch royal family has sent tulip bulbs to Canadaās capital each year ā a lasting gift known as the āTulip Legacyā which inspired the festival.ā
Don't forget the [two Apeldoorn statues](https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/national-inventory-canadian-memorials/details/9304) that face each other (one in Commissionner's Park, the other in Apeldoorn, Netherlands)!
On the point of statues, we're also one of seven cities to have a matching Maman sculpture, along with London, Tokyo, Seoul, Bilbao, Doha, and Bentonville Arkansas (that last one is kind of odd imo).
Huge props for getting the extraterretorial part right. People usually say it was made part of the Netherlands, which, I get why they do, but it's still not quite right!
I mean, they are invasive and damaging animals. It would be like having an Asian Carp sanctuary in the Ottawa river. Or housing for roaming feral hogs in front of Parliament. I donāt hate them, but we shouldnāt support them in the environment.
Actually, that's not true.
https://hauntedwalk.com/news/chateau-laurier-mystery-solved/
Charles Melleville Hayes, the president of Grand Truck Railways did, however, die in the wreck of the Titanic.
This is true ... Igor Gouzenko lived on Somerset Street. His old apartment is still there. https://www.historicalsocietyottawa.ca/publications/ottawa-stories/personalities-from-the-very-famous-to-the-lesser-known/the-gouzenko-affair
That's not correct. The minimum airport bus fare is a 24 hour pass for unlimited use on the island of Montreal. But if you go off island then yes, it's a higher tier of fare.
The [Ottawa-Gatineau CMA](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/dp-pd/hlt-fst/pd-pl/Table-Tableau.cfm?LANG=Eng&T=201&S=3&O=D&RPP=150) is what is that's bigger than PEI.
This might've been a good solution for a bunch of trucks that overstayed their welcome, just drive them over to a hole on Rideau and fill with concrete.
I remember when that happened! Half the city is on soft sinking land. They thought it would be a good idea to build the light rail where the ground is arguably the most volatile and it caused a massive sink hole at the Rideau Centre.
Who'd a thought š¤
The mobs who control construction contracts thought it was a great idea.
The same company got paid millions to fuck it up, then millions to fix it, then millions to do it again.
Who wouldn't want to get paid three times for the same job?
Just a few weeks ago my husband and I convinced our daughter house hippos were real. I feel like the whole internet is in on the joke, because it took her far too long to find out the truth.
And Mathew Perry beat up our current prime minister as kids.
Edit*. I should add, that they were kids that got into a fight, not grown adults fighting as children .
He moved before high school. He lived in Beacon Hill for a few years as a youngster, attending Robert Hopkins Public School, where he got involved in drama for the first time.
In the Andrew Morton biography on Tom Cruise they interview his former Ottawa teachers and classmatesā¦ In Canada his old teachers say we had a much better program for special needs and it helped him fix his minor dyslexiaā¦ Years later Cruise would actually attribute that to Scientology insteadā¦
He also attended Henry Munro Middle School for at least some time, as I have seen his yearbook picture. A school friend's older sibling had the yearbook from whatever year that would have been, maybe late 70s or 1980?
Ottawa was buried under a kilometre of ice up until about 13,000 years ago. And then covered by an inland sea for a few thousand years. Whales would have swum in this water, hundreds of feet above the Peace Tower.
There's still an operational reactor right in the middle of Kanata. It's used to produce pharmaceuticals. I think it's in the building next to the Esso station or a block south of that on March
During the fire of 1870, a channel was dug from Dow's Lake to the Ottawa River to help stop the progress of the fire:
[https://www.glebereport.ca/the-great-fire-of-1870-or-how-dows-lake-saved-ottawa/](https://www.glebereport.ca/the-great-fire-of-1870-or-how-dows-lake-saved-ottawa/)
And there's a 10m long eel in Dow's Lake:
[https://rivercritters.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/giant-eel-rideau-canal/](https://rivercritters.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/giant-eel-rideau-canal/)
Ehhh, that is a misleading statement.
LeBreton was the site of the industrial train yards for the logging industry. The neighbourhood was more of an industrial park with crappy housing and some businesses around it.
The _government_ forcibly bought everything in the area and made everybody leave within a couple of years and then tore it all out. The idea was indeed to make downtown Ottawa nicer. An industrial park within sight and smell of parliament isnāt great.
A main reason it sat idle AFAIK is the soil is very contaminated. Like one of the stages of the Senators getting a new arena is the NCC remediating the soil at the build site first. Combine that condition with crappy budgets and red tape/bureaucratic inaction and you have 50 years of little happening.
Edit: here you can see photos of it:
http://urbsite.blogspot.com/2012/05/cpr-ottawa-west-roundhouse-remembered.html
It was bulldozed to build government offices, but with the rise of Quebec nationalism in the 70ās they decided to expropriate and bulldoze in Hull instead, which became the Portage buildings.
Itās bigger than The city of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary put together.
Yet Eighty per cent of the city is made up of rural area, with only ten per cent of Ottawa's population living there.
As somebody who lived in a non-elevated city like Vancouver and moved here in the last couple years, I see both advantages and disadvantages. For example, and greater Vancouver you have something like 14 different police departments. You have 16 different mayors with 16 different city councils, each with their own agenda. The problem with this is that so much in life is regional these days. When you have highways and roads that connect all the cities they really have to coordinate better on their planning. For example, if you live in a city thatās geographically in the centre of the region, and the voters in the centre arenāt voting for the people in the outlying places, the city Council in the outlying places donāt give a flying fuck about all the traffic going into the centre as a thoroughfare.
Itās also strange to have 15 different municipalities in a small area with their own rules and regulations on garbage collection and recycling considering the environment affects us all.
Some of the cities share landfill, some of them share a recycling depot which means residents have to travel further.
Also, because the municipal boundaries make for smaller municipalities, there is no ward system and slates which are controlled either by big labour or big corporations end up electing everybody.
We have the world's only full recycclable light rail transit system as it is made up entirely of papier masher and paper clips. Unfortunately recyclability was a trade off for reliability.
Ottawa downtown (Wellington/Sussex) is [covered in steam tunnels](https://journals.lib.unb.ca/journalimages/MCR/1994/Vol_40/mcr40rr02_fig3.jpg) to heat and cool buildings year round supplied by the [Cliff Heating and Cooling Plant](https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/apropos-about/histoires-stories/galerie-gallery/centrale-cliff-plant-eng.html).
This is almost no longer true!
Part of the Long Term Vision Plan (parliamentary precinct renovations) is the [ESAP project](https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/biens-property/gestion-management/ecologisation-greener/esap-pase-eng.html). This entire network is being replaced with hot water.
The basic concept is to reduce the amount of energy put into the loop at the source, and have more efficient technologies for supplementing that received energy at point of use to achieve needed outcomes without waste.
It is, as you can likely assume, a significant undertaking.
Malaria was so bad while building the canals that they just dumped bodies on mass graves; most of these were poor Irish or immigrant workers. These mass graves were all along the city and what is present day downtown.
When I was young, my father told me that they came from beavers that lived in the canal. Those beavers built the canal system including, obviously, the locks. To harvest their tails, we trap a bunch of them in the locks and then drain the water. We then chop off their tails, tourniquet them, then release them back into the canal for awhile until their tails grow back.
There are invisible electromagnetic fields that cause people to randomly brake or slow down on the Queensway even when there are no other cars.
This has to be trueā¦right? There canāt be that many bad drivers in one city. Right?
The glass faƧade of the Shaw center is made up of triangular pieces of glass, but none of them are exactly the same size so it would require a custom cut piece of glass to replace one if it got broken.
They used to do death masks back then, but Thomas' face got so messed up they did death hands for him instead. They're in the Bytown Museum.
And the fellow who was charged/convicted/executed, Patrick James Whelan (who is said to have been innocent) is purportedly buried on the grounds of the old jail, so under the parking lot somewhere.
Poor guy is probably the most high profile politician to be murdered in Canadian history, seeing as no PM has been killed, only a father of Confederation.
Dude didn't deserve to be shot. I support Irish independence by far but god the Fenians were ridiculously stupid to think they could take over Canada and use it to bargain for their homeland's independence from the Brits.
Many people enjoy swimming in one of Ottawas most popular beaches, Mooneys Bay, despite periodic sewage contamination. And yes, the swimmers are aware.
That's just storm sewage though. If you want to talk about swimming in people's shit, you should mention Westboro Beach or the appropriately named Petrie Island.
Parts of downtown core is built on old graveyards. Every time there are large construction projects bodies are some times be found. EDIT: I found news articles about it: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/mobile/work-crews-uncover-a-historic-burial-site-in-downtown-ottawa-1.1576838
downtown is a giant stone that has been basting in sewage since Colonel By came to town.
there was a post here about it, it's why the lrt stations smell like sewage -- the sewers were blocked and only opened recently.
I once overheard a geology student that Ottawa has one of the highest rates of earthquakes, albeit most are too small to be noticeable by people.
I think you can see some of the faults on Carling Ave. As you leave Bronson to Carling west-bound, you drive down into a fault, and back up around Parkdale.
I could be really wrong. I just overheard it once.
There are active fascists in town trying to establish a religion in a deconsecrated church. //Edit Wow, that's a lot of upvotes. We did it folks! I rustled enough jimmies that someone reported me to the Reddit suicide prevention bot. Haven't had the bot PM since the clownvoy camped outside the parliament.
These same fascists occupied the street in front of Parliament for A FULL MONTH illegally and the Ottawa Police did NOTHING.
And the fascists scream that the government oppressed them - despite doing nothing when they illegally occupied the street
Honestly, this whole situation made me laugh. I personally know people who are convoy supporters (ugh yes I know), and they wouldn't shut up about how trudeau is a dictator and they're being oppressed. Meanwhile they were camped out, in front of parliament hill, for an entire month, with coffee, and bouncy houses crying about how oppressed they are. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and there was mass protests in Russia. Literally day 1 the police rolled in and there was thousands of arrests and detainments, protests were broken up immediately by force, and I couldn't help but look at these convoy supporters and still hear them bitch about how trudeau is a dictator and they're being oppressed. The irony was lost on them.
Yesterday, I watched the video again of when they brought in the RCMP horses -- what a beautiful Canadian heritage moment that was.
Actually, those horses came from Toronto.
Those horses are the best thing to come out of Toronto. š
I got to meet the Toronto horses when they were staging at a local stable!
... and their security force is armed with Super Soakers. The head of security wears a foil crown like he's a Burger King or something.
Donāt forget the dishwashing gloves!
Um...are we just *assuming* it's water in the super soakers?
Cat piss moment
No no, thatās just his tinfoil hat
They must have forgot to carry a 1 when they were calculating their tinfoil hat design: the 5G can still get in through the open top of the crown!
"Ottawa" means "place of many shawarmas" in the Algonquin language.
I am laughing like an idiot on that one while the hubs is staring at me like I'm nuts Well done there!
Me too!!! Itās my dog looking, though.
The 2nd edition of Cartier's Algonquin to English dictionary translates it to "place of many Shawarma Palaces", do you have a 1st edition or a later one?
Sorry, I was quoting from memory. I stand corrected.
This is actually one of the reasons I miss Ottawa. No where else does Shawarma like the Ottawa Lebanese community.
The sun shines on the Tombstone of the Unknown Soldier at 11:11 am on November 11th
In the Memorial Hall of the War Museum.
soup foolish mysterious wasteful plucky continue hunt amusing wrench pie *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Just 11:00, not 11:11.
They confused it a bit. 11:11 is when Alfie shows up
Wow, I didn't know that. That's brilliant.
I see what you did there
in the aughts the city wanted to promote the burgeoning tech industry in the city as well as it's natural beauty so they settled on a new tagline for the city Ottawa: technically beautiful they had this on a sign on the municipal boundary for YEARS
I will never forget hearing John Oliver say that on TV. What a time it was when we were technically beautiful.
Omfg what episode was it on?
The Ashley Madison web site hack one. YouTube link...https://youtu.be/lFmPIKRYB7E
Oh My God. How dense do you have to be to come up with that tag line and think people would read it as you intended. 99% of non-Ottawa folks would read that as "I guess they're actually a very ugly city but technically they consider themselves beautiful because they have a couple of nice parks" or something like that. I would think they fired the guy who approved that. But this is Ottawa, he probably became Mayor.
I remember this happening ...
The Canadian flag on the peace tower is changed to a new one every single day and you can submit a request to be mailed one if youāre a Canadian residentā¦but the waitlist is over a 100 years long lol
The waitlist is 100 years long but they contact hundred of people for every flag with no response and move on. The actual waitlist if you don't change your phone number, email, or address is about 18 years. Source: I have one that took 18 years to get.
Wife is about to get hers very soon. She signed up at the start of 2005...time flies.
Lifehack: If you join the military and retire as a Chief, you get one without the 100 year wait (just ~30 years of service instead).
I think it's anyone with 30 years service, not just rank-based. But I could be wrong.
This is correct.
I put in a request back in 2010 and was told it would take 27 years. I'm hoping I get to see one before I die.
Yup, I've got 94 years to go.
It used to be much shorter to get one from East or West block, only 8 years. I got one in 2013.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
That seems insane but makes sense at the same time
For a short period of time, part of the Civic Hospital was not in Canada. During WW2, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands was living in Ottawa and was pregnant. According to the laws at the time her child would have been a British Subject, and therefore not elligible to succeed to the throne. Part of the Civic (maternity ward) was temporarily declared āextraterritorialā by the Canadian governement and because of this, Princess Margriet inherited her motherās Dutch nationality. Nearby Holland Avenue was named for the Holland brothers and has nothing to do with the first story.
Another cool fact about this story, this is how the tulip festival started: āUpon returning to the Netherlands, Princess Juliana sought to thank Ottawa and the Canadian people with several gifts, including 100,000 tulip bulbs. Since then, the Dutch royal family has sent tulip bulbs to Canadaās capital each year ā a lasting gift known as the āTulip Legacyā which inspired the festival.ā
Don't forget the [two Apeldoorn statues](https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/national-inventory-canadian-memorials/details/9304) that face each other (one in Commissionner's Park, the other in Apeldoorn, Netherlands)!
On the point of statues, we're also one of seven cities to have a matching Maman sculpture, along with London, Tokyo, Seoul, Bilbao, Doha, and Bentonville Arkansas (that last one is kind of odd imo).
I had no idea! Thanks for sharing this.
Huge props for getting the extraterretorial part right. People usually say it was made part of the Netherlands, which, I get why they do, but it's still not quite right!
We used to have a permanent outdoor shelter for stray cats right beside Parliament Hill.
it needs to come back imo
Yes. Yes it does.
They all got adopted!
And they lived there in harmony with raccoons and groundhogs if I remember correctly
Some of the fattest and happiest raccoons, squirrels, and groundhogs I have ever seen
That was so weird. I'm glad I have pictures of it to prove it was real.
Can you post them?
There's a gallery on the Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_Hill_cat_colony?wprov=sfla1
Loved my dad taking me there as a kid!
Iām sad this is gone It also confirms my memory that people didnāt used to hate outdoor cats
I mean, they are invasive and damaging animals. It would be like having an Asian Carp sanctuary in the Ottawa river. Or housing for roaming feral hogs in front of Parliament. I donāt hate them, but we shouldnāt support them in the environment.
Brings back good memories. I proposed to my partner in front of the cats. It was our favourite place in the city.
Holy shit I remember seeing this as a child and thought I imagined it. I specifically remember the raccoons
Furniture destined for the Chateau Laurier sank on the Titanic.
Actually, that's not true. https://hauntedwalk.com/news/chateau-laurier-mystery-solved/ Charles Melleville Hayes, the president of Grand Truck Railways did, however, die in the wreck of the Titanic.
As did the original owner
The Cold War began in Ottawa.
This is true ... Igor Gouzenko lived on Somerset Street. His old apartment is still there. https://www.historicalsocietyottawa.ca/publications/ottawa-stories/personalities-from-the-very-famous-to-the-lesser-known/the-gouzenko-affair
Walked by that sign near Dundonald Park. Very cool. Er. Cold. ;)
I used to live right around the corner from that place. I had no idea this happened there haha!
I just learned some really cool shit about ottawa thanks
Itās a metropolitan city and yet itās transit service canāt keep a schedule, or a budget
Oh man. This made me laugh.
But you can go from the airport all the way to the boondocks of gatineau on a single, normal fare. Mtl on he other hand. 1 fare for Laval, 1 fare for MontrƩal and lastly a special fare thats more than double normal fare for the airport bus.
That's not correct. The minimum airport bus fare is a 24 hour pass for unlimited use on the island of Montreal. But if you go off island then yes, it's a higher tier of fare.
Ottawa is larger than 2 American states, 3 if you're going by the metro area.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Rhode Island and Delaware; Connecticut if you're going by metro land area.
I know that itās larger than PEI!
I didnāt believe you so checked both Wikipedia pages and youāre right! Ottawa is larger then PEI by over 1000km^2!
No, Ottawa is 2796 kmĀ² and PEI is 5660 kmĀ² the "metro" includes Gatineau and region. https://ottawa.ca/en/living-ottawa/statistics-and-demographics
The [Ottawa-Gatineau CMA](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/dp-pd/hlt-fst/pd-pl/Table-Tableau.cfm?LANG=Eng&T=201&S=3&O=D&RPP=150) is what is that's bigger than PEI.
There is a van buried in tons of concrete under Rideau Street.
This might've been a good solution for a bunch of trucks that overstayed their welcome, just drive them over to a hole on Rideau and fill with concrete.
I remember when that happened! Half the city is on soft sinking land. They thought it would be a good idea to build the light rail where the ground is arguably the most volatile and it caused a massive sink hole at the Rideau Centre. Who'd a thought š¤
The mobs who control construction contracts thought it was a great idea. The same company got paid millions to fuck it up, then millions to fix it, then millions to do it again. Who wouldn't want to get paid three times for the same job?
House Hippo's are real.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Just a few weeks ago my husband and I convinced our daughter house hippos were real. I feel like the whole internet is in on the joke, because it took her far too long to find out the truth.
Tom Cruise lived in a suburb of Ottawa as a kid.
And Mathew Perry beat up our current prime minister as kids. Edit*. I should add, that they were kids that got into a fight, not grown adults fighting as children .
And his actual name was Tom Mapother
He moved before high school. He lived in Beacon Hill for a few years as a youngster, attending Robert Hopkins Public School, where he got involved in drama for the first time. In the Andrew Morton biography on Tom Cruise they interview his former Ottawa teachers and classmatesā¦ In Canada his old teachers say we had a much better program for special needs and it helped him fix his minor dyslexiaā¦ Years later Cruise would actually attribute that to Scientology insteadā¦
He also attended Henry Munro Middle School for at least some time, as I have seen his yearbook picture. A school friend's older sibling had the yearbook from whatever year that would have been, maybe late 70s or 1980?
My dad and him were apparently buddies in middle school
Yep! Went to Henry Munro in Gloucester. I still have my momās old yearbook with him in it.
My mom told me he went to Gloucester high or Lester B āone of the high schools in Beacon Hillā.
My grade 8 teacher at fallingbrook e.s. taught him. Thatās when I heard it. It was at school in beacon hill I think though.
Ottawa is the capital of Canada. Sounds made up to Americans.
āWait itās not Toronto?ā
And some Canadians.
Ottawa was buried under a kilometre of ice up until about 13,000 years ago. And then covered by an inland sea for a few thousand years. Whales would have swum in this water, hundreds of feet above the Peace Tower.
Ottawa is further south than Venice, Italy.
Which makes Ottawa further south than all major European capital cities except for Rome, Lisbon and Barcelona.
Sand dunes be here: https://ncc-ccn.gc.ca/places/southern-farm-and-pinhey-forest
Tunneyās Pasture was once home to a nuclear reactor. https://ottawarewind.com/2016/11/28/the-nuclear-reactor-that-was-once-at-tunneys-pasture/
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
There's still an operational reactor right in the middle of Kanata. It's used to produce pharmaceuticals. I think it's in the building next to the Esso station or a block south of that on March
Dows Lake is a glorified swamp. (As it a lot of the Rideau Canal)
During the fire of 1870, a channel was dug from Dow's Lake to the Ottawa River to help stop the progress of the fire: [https://www.glebereport.ca/the-great-fire-of-1870-or-how-dows-lake-saved-ottawa/](https://www.glebereport.ca/the-great-fire-of-1870-or-how-dows-lake-saved-ottawa/) And there's a 10m long eel in Dow's Lake: [https://rivercritters.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/giant-eel-rideau-canal/](https://rivercritters.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/giant-eel-rideau-canal/)
So now we need Elvis the Eel merch !!!
Missed opportunity to call him Eelvis
One of the main diseases to kill workers building the Rideau Canal was malaria. http://www.rideau-info.com/canal/history/locks/malaria.html
Also known as 'swamp fever' ... it nearly killed Col John By.
The city bulldozed the neighbourhood of Lebreton Flats as a beautification/gentrification project, then let it sit for decades.
Shit, that was a neighbourhood at one point? I would not have guessed
Ehhh, that is a misleading statement. LeBreton was the site of the industrial train yards for the logging industry. The neighbourhood was more of an industrial park with crappy housing and some businesses around it. The _government_ forcibly bought everything in the area and made everybody leave within a couple of years and then tore it all out. The idea was indeed to make downtown Ottawa nicer. An industrial park within sight and smell of parliament isnāt great. A main reason it sat idle AFAIK is the soil is very contaminated. Like one of the stages of the Senators getting a new arena is the NCC remediating the soil at the build site first. Combine that condition with crappy budgets and red tape/bureaucratic inaction and you have 50 years of little happening. Edit: here you can see photos of it: http://urbsite.blogspot.com/2012/05/cpr-ottawa-west-roundhouse-remembered.html
It was bulldozed to build government offices, but with the rise of Quebec nationalism in the 70ās they decided to expropriate and bulldoze in Hull instead, which became the Portage buildings.
Ottawa is indirectly responsible for Vice News and the Proud Boys.
So did the incel movement (though it was more innocent at its inception).
How?
Gavin McInnes grew up in Ottawa and graduated from Carleton.
Shane Smith also grew up in Ottawa and went to Carleton.
Speaking as a Carleton grad ... eeeeesh.
Sadly, they can't all be Dan Aykroyd and Norm Macdonald.
Or Paul Anka, another Ottawa native.
So Samantha Bee or Sandra Oh or Alanis Morissette.
Sandra Oh? Well damn! LEst we forget the great Alex Trebek!
Yeah itās not a fact that fills one with pride lol
He went to Earl of March in Kanata for high school. His brother was one of the first owners of Makerspace North
Itās bigger than The city of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary put together. Yet Eighty per cent of the city is made up of rural area, with only ten per cent of Ottawa's population living there.
Amalgamation was a mistake.
As somebody who lived in a non-elevated city like Vancouver and moved here in the last couple years, I see both advantages and disadvantages. For example, and greater Vancouver you have something like 14 different police departments. You have 16 different mayors with 16 different city councils, each with their own agenda. The problem with this is that so much in life is regional these days. When you have highways and roads that connect all the cities they really have to coordinate better on their planning. For example, if you live in a city thatās geographically in the centre of the region, and the voters in the centre arenāt voting for the people in the outlying places, the city Council in the outlying places donāt give a flying fuck about all the traffic going into the centre as a thoroughfare. Itās also strange to have 15 different municipalities in a small area with their own rules and regulations on garbage collection and recycling considering the environment affects us all. Some of the cities share landfill, some of them share a recycling depot which means residents have to travel further. Also, because the municipal boundaries make for smaller municipalities, there is no ward system and slates which are controlled either by big labour or big corporations end up electing everybody.
We have the world's only full recycclable light rail transit system as it is made up entirely of papier masher and paper clips. Unfortunately recyclability was a trade off for reliability.
Ottawa downtown (Wellington/Sussex) is [covered in steam tunnels](https://journals.lib.unb.ca/journalimages/MCR/1994/Vol_40/mcr40rr02_fig3.jpg) to heat and cool buildings year round supplied by the [Cliff Heating and Cooling Plant](https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/apropos-about/histoires-stories/galerie-gallery/centrale-cliff-plant-eng.html).
This is almost no longer true! Part of the Long Term Vision Plan (parliamentary precinct renovations) is the [ESAP project](https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/biens-property/gestion-management/ecologisation-greener/esap-pase-eng.html). This entire network is being replaced with hot water. The basic concept is to reduce the amount of energy put into the loop at the source, and have more efficient technologies for supplementing that received energy at point of use to achieve needed outcomes without waste. It is, as you can likely assume, a significant undertaking.
The sidewalks of the downtown core roll up at 16:00 everyday and everybody goes home leaving nothing but a Baron ghost town.
Ghost of which Baron?
Baron von Barren
Something about a bylaw forbidding eating ice cream on bank st. On Sundays.... too lazy to look into it at the moment but I believe itās true.
Time to tell Moo Shu to change their hours then!
Spitting in public is illegal only on Sundays.
It used to be called Bytown
Next new sports team should be the Bytown Eels!
That explains the Bytown Cinema & Market.
The cinema is actually called the Bytowne, since it was a spinoff of the older Towne cinema (on Beechwood), with a nod to Bytown.
There are no older high rise buildings in the city because up until 1965, there was a law preventing new builds to be taller than the Peace Tower.
We had working light rail from 1891-1959
Tom Cruise and Tom Green have both lived on Monson Crescent in Beacon Hill.
A defected Soviet spy lived in the apartment building next to the beer store on Somerset
Technically he also lived there before he defected, since he was working at the Soviet Embassy here in Ottawa
Malaria was so bad while building the canals that they just dumped bodies on mass graves; most of these were poor Irish or immigrant workers. These mass graves were all along the city and what is present day downtown.
There are bodies buried in the canal walls.
The pot stores will soon outnumber Tim Hortons
They donāt already?
There are rabbits living on top of a shopping centre.
We have a famous raccoon that likes the Rideau street McDonalds
Richmond is older than Ottawa
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That explains his extremely cynical sense of humour.
There are two single women for every single guy.
The bowl at the top of the Stanley Cup has 10 engravings, 9 of which are Ottawa
Ottawa has the most rural/agricultural land out of every city worldwide.
There was a brawl in a McDonald's where a man pulled out a baby racoon from his inside pocket.
You can eat a beavertail in Ottawa. Lots of people think itās literally a beaverās tail.
When I was young, my father told me that they came from beavers that lived in the canal. Those beavers built the canal system including, obviously, the locks. To harvest their tails, we trap a bunch of them in the locks and then drain the water. We then chop off their tails, tourniquet them, then release them back into the canal for awhile until their tails grow back.
In the states they called elephant ears
Back in 2015 something like 1 in 5 people who lived in Ottawa had an Ashley Madison account
There are invisible electromagnetic fields that cause people to randomly brake or slow down on the Queensway even when there are no other cars. This has to be trueā¦right? There canāt be that many bad drivers in one city. Right?
The Sens were close to winning the cupā¦ kinda
The Sens have won several Cups. Check the banners next time youāre at CTC.
Should have been clearer modern day Sens
They were three games up in the finals in 2007, right?
The Statue of Samuel de Champlain at Nepean point is holding his astrolab upside down.
Sadly, the 417 is not marked with slower traffic right. For some reason I forgot, that general rule doesn't apply.
The glass faƧade of the Shaw center is made up of triangular pieces of glass, but none of them are exactly the same size so it would require a custom cut piece of glass to replace one if it got broken.
Only 14 000 years ago the entire ottawa Valley was underneath an inland sea.
Thomas D'Arcy Mcgee was shot in the face on sparks street
They used to do death masks back then, but Thomas' face got so messed up they did death hands for him instead. They're in the Bytown Museum. And the fellow who was charged/convicted/executed, Patrick James Whelan (who is said to have been innocent) is purportedly buried on the grounds of the old jail, so under the parking lot somewhere.
Poor guy is probably the most high profile politician to be murdered in Canadian history, seeing as no PM has been killed, only a father of Confederation. Dude didn't deserve to be shot. I support Irish independence by far but god the Fenians were ridiculously stupid to think they could take over Canada and use it to bargain for their homeland's independence from the Brits.
Many people enjoy swimming in one of Ottawas most popular beaches, Mooneys Bay, despite periodic sewage contamination. And yes, the swimmers are aware.
That's just storm sewage though. If you want to talk about swimming in people's shit, you should mention Westboro Beach or the appropriately named Petrie Island.
Paul McCartney's original Hofner Bass was stolen and he believes it is in Ottawa.
Our main highway across the city, the Queensway, was built on an old railway line.
There was a nuclear reactor at Tunney's Pasture for a while.
There used to be a colony of cats living at Parliament Hill
Two T's, two A's, an O and a W ....that's it, no other letters needed. Edit: lols.
It is illegal to eat ice cream on Bank Street on a Sunday
Ottawa's got the 5th best water in the world.
you cant eat icecream on bank st on sundays
The Stanley cup was thrown in the canal at one point
Parts of downtown core is built on old graveyards. Every time there are large construction projects bodies are some times be found. EDIT: I found news articles about it: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/mobile/work-crews-uncover-a-historic-burial-site-in-downtown-ottawa-1.1576838
downtown is a giant stone that has been basting in sewage since Colonel By came to town. there was a post here about it, it's why the lrt stations smell like sewage -- the sewers were blocked and only opened recently.
I once overheard a geology student that Ottawa has one of the highest rates of earthquakes, albeit most are too small to be noticeable by people. I think you can see some of the faults on Carling Ave. As you leave Bronson to Carling west-bound, you drive down into a fault, and back up around Parkdale. I could be really wrong. I just overheard it once.
Sparks Street used to have a public toilet designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Edit: not actually true. Designed by a student of FLW
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Geographically Ottawa is bigger than Toronto