- This article is about the capital city of Canada. For other meanings see Ottawa (disambiguation).
City of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
|
| Motto: Advance Ottawa/Ottawa en avant |
|
| Area: | 2,778.64 sq. km. |
Population
- Total (2001)
- Cdn. CD Rank:
- Cdn. Mun. Rank:
- Density |
774,072
Ranked 7th
Ranked 4th
278.6/km² |
| Time zone | Eastern: UTC-5 |
|
Latitude
Longitude
|
45°19' N
75°40' W
| | MPs | | Mauril Bélanger, Don Boudria, Ed Broadbent, Marlene Catterall, Marc Godbout, David McGuinty, Gordon O'Connor, Pierre Poilievre
| | MPPs | | John Baird, Jean-Marc Lalonde, Dalton McGuinty, Phil McNeely, Madeleine Meilleur, Richard Patten, Norm Sterling, Jim Watson |
| Mayor | Bob Chiarelli
| | Governing body | Ottawa City Council
| | City of Ottawa (http://city.ottawa.on.ca) |
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, and the fourth largest city in Canada. It is located in the eastern part of the province of Ontario. The population as of 2001 was approximately 774,072 people. The Ottawa region has a population of approximately 1,110,498. The mayor of the city today (February 2005) is Bob Chiarelli.
As with other capital cities, the word Ottawa is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities.
Geography
Ottawa sits on the south bank of the Ottawa River, around the
mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centre Town, which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Between here and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings.
The Ottawa urban area extends for considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Kanata and Cumberland. Around the city is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest and marshland. A number of satellite towns and rural communities lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality.
Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although administered separately, the two cities both fall within the remit of the National Capital Commission and for many purposes are considered a single metropolitan area, called Canada's Capital Region.
Transportation
Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, by Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (better known as Ottawa International) and by a number of long distance bus companies.
Ottawa's main mass transit company is known as OC Transpo. The bus transit system includes the Transitway, a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops. There is also a pilot-project diesel light rail system called the O-Train. See List of Ottawa Transitway and O-Train stations. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau.
The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are adjacent to the Parliament Buildings. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 8 km for ice skaters (from about Dow's Lake to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's longest skating rink.
Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connected the Great Lakes and St Lawrence River with the Ottawa river.
Notable buildings and institutions
 The changing of the guard in front of the Parliament of Canada. Some of the notable buildings in Ottawa include the Parliament Buildings, where Canada's government resides; 24 Sussex Drive, the home of the Prime Minister of Canada; and Rideau Hall, the home of the Governor-General of Canada. Ottawa also has several museums, including the National Gallery of Canada, Canadian War Museum, Canada Science and Technology Museum, Canadian Aviation Museum and Canadian Museum of Nature. The Canadian Museum of Civilization is located across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Quebec. Ottawa is also the home of the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, and Algonquin College. Ottawa is served by Macdonald-Cartier International Airport. All federal buildings and lands are managed by the National Capital Commission an organisation that has a great deal of power over the city.
See also: List of Ottawa buildings
Annual Events
- Winterlude is an annual winter carnival held each year in February. It is focused on the Rideau Canal.
- Canada Day is one of Ottawa's most important holidays and people from across the nation visit to celebrate the nation's birthday.
Primary industries
Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and high technology. Major companies such as Nortel, Alcatel, JDS Uniphase, Mitel, Bell Canada, TELUS, and Corel have offices in the city.
Sports
Ottawa is home to two major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators ice hockey team (established 1992) of the National Hockey League and the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002) Canadian football team of the Canadian Football League. The Senators play at the Corel Centre and the Renegades at Frank Clair Stadium. Ottawa is also home to a minor league baseball team, the AAA farm team of the Baltimore Orioles, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hocke team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two univiersities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athelitc associtions, and the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee Gees respectively.
It also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, biking and jogging along the Ottawa River and Rideau Canal in summer, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River. During the coldest parts of winter there is Ice fishing on the Ottawa river.
History
The Ottawa region was long home to First Nations peoples who were part of the Algonquin. The first European settlement in the Ottawa region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible and Ottawa was soon booming based almost entirely off timber. The city grew even further in importance when the Rideau Canal was constructed by Colonel John By to connect Ottawa with Kingston which was then the colonial capital of Canada. Ottawa was then known as Bytown, but was incorporated as Ottawa in 1855.
Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons, most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river.
Map of Ottawa's annexation history. On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for Canada East and Canada West (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to people. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was only a small 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. In fact, the Queen's advisors had her pick Ottawa for two important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (and is still on the Quebec/Ontario border today), so it was a clever compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable the major cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via 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 (about 500 km as the crow flies) 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 had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals.
 The Byward Market provides fresh produce throughout the warm months The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa burned down on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons was temporarily relocated to the Victorian era building which was then the Victoria Museum, and is currently (2004) the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about 1 km south of Parliament Hill at the opposite end of Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centre-piece 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 weeks 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 RCMP refused to take the documents, since 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 being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy networking operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans.
In 2001, the city of Ottawa was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean, Kanata, Gloucester, Rockcliffe Park, Vanier and Cumberland, and the rural townships of West Carleton, Osgoode, Rideau and Goulbourn, along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland.
See also: List of Ottawa mayors
Demographics
According to the 2001 Statistics Canada census, there are 774,072 people, 310,132 households, and 210,875 families residing in the city. The population density is 278.6/km².
The lingustic makeup (mother tongue) of the city is 63.6% anglophone, 15.0% francophone, 0.9% both languages, 20.3% allophone.
The racial makeup of the city is 80.90% White, 4.54% Black, 3.62% Chinese, 2.84% South Asian, 2.67% Arab, 1.14% Southeast Asian, 1.13% Aboriginal, 0.85% Latin American, 0.66% West Asian, 0.64% Filipino, 0.20% Japanese, 0.19% Korean, 0.31% Other, 0.33% Multiple responses.
There are 210,875 families out of which 72.8% are married couples living together, 11.1% are common-law couples, and 13.2% have a female householder with no husband present.
In the city the population is spread out with 25.3% under the age of 19, 6.9% from 20 to 24, 32.5% from 25 to 44, 23.8% from 45 to 64, and 11.5% who are 65 years of age or older. The median age is 36.7 years. For every 100 females there are 95.1 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 92.1 males.
The median income for a working individual in the city is $39,713, and the median income for a family is $73,507. Males have a median income of $47,203 versus $31,641 for females. The per capita income for the city is $23,061.
 The dramatic rear view of Parliament Hill, with the Library of Parliament perched atop the deep gorge of the Ottawa River. Local media
See List of Ottawa media outlets.
Education
See also List of Ottawa schools
Famous People From Ottawa
( or that called Ottawa home at a point in time )
- Dan Aykroyd, actor, comedian
- Paul Anka, singer
- Margaret Atwood, writer
- Billy Boucher
- Rod Brind'Amour, NHL hockey player
- Tom Cavanagh
- Sarah Chalke, actor
- Catherine Clark, daughter of former PM Joe Clark
- Adrienne Clarkson, Governor General of Canada
- Tom Cruise, actor (lived briefly in Ottawa)
- Clive Doucet, author, counsellor
- Tom Green, comedian
- Elisabeth Harvor
- Jessica Holmes, actor, comedian
- Peter Jennings, journalist
- Yousuf Karsh
- Rich Little, comedian
- Peter Mansbridge, journalist
- Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario
- Alanis Morissette, singer/songwriter
- Matthew Perry, actor
- Rick Vaive
- Bob Rae, former Premier of Ontario
- Shelagh Rogers, journalist
Item of Interest
The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa.
See also
Geographical features
Events:
Other:
External links
 View of part of downtown Ottawa, with the National Gallery at left
|
