This weekend Bitter and I attended a wedding of a friend of mine in Ottawa, Ontario. I’ve been to Montreal and Toronto several times, but I had never been to Ottawa. It’s not unlike our own capital in look and feel, except their Parliament building is in the gothic style.
But many of the Canadian government buildings which house the large bureaucracies don’t look much different than our own. Showing left is Canada’s parliament building, which was unfortunately blocked from the front by the stage for the Canada Day activities beginning today. We decided to get back to the US before Canada Day, since the locals told us things could get pretty crazy. I’m sure Canada’s definition of crazy is probably pretty mild and polite, unless it involves losing a hockey game, in which case it only gets sad. I managed to snap a picture of the Supreme Court of Canada which will soon be hearing the case involving Quebec’s challenge to the destruction of the federal long gun registry.
 As the article mentioned, Quebec suffered a devastating loss in the Court of Appeals, not only losing the case, but having to pay court costs. Quebec wants to retain a copy of the registry to use in order to form the basis of a planned provincial registry. The entire capital area is under quite a lot of construction. Probably the best capital improvements a shale oil an gas boom can buy. Canada’s economy has weathered the financial crisis quite well. Ottawa is also the entrance to the Rideau Canal system, which was constructed in the 1830s as a means to move goods from Ottawa to Kingston on Lake Ontario in the event a war with the United States. Now it’s mostly used for pleasure boating, and operated by the Canadian park service as a historic landmark:
It’s a nice city. If you ever have an opportunity to go sometime, I’d recommend it. I’ll be getting back to regular blogging shortly, but it’ll take me a while to catch up. I also have a number of other things going on which require my attention.
Go there in winter and you can skate from one end of the city to the other on the Rideau canal.
Also, not sure how things have changed since I went there last, but I recall the Canadian War Museum as being really, really cool, with some rare Commonwealth hardware not usually found in the lower 48.
Check out Winterlude and the frozen canal activities in the winter, pretty awesome.
The Canadian banking system is awesome and stable. The Canadian’s were not foolish enough to remove their Glass-Steagall like banking regs.
Canada and the US were close to war at one time????
Got any details on that? I’ve never heard about it before……
See American Revolution and War of 1812. Canada invaded in both instances and US forces were driven out. Also see the Oregon Crisis. “54-40 or fight!”