Ottawa, 1998

Queen Victoria (following the confidential advice of Canada's Governor General, Sir Edmund Head) chose Ottawa as Canada's capital in 1857. The late Goldwin Smith* thought it a poor choice. His snorted comment: "A subarctic village converted by royal mandate into a political cockpit." Ottawa (pop. about 160,000) is no longer a village. Neither is it the "Washington of the North" that Sir Wilfrid Laurier hoped that it would be. It is not for want of trying.

In the past half century, three different city planners and countless commissions and boards have produced plans to beautify Ottawa, if not make it bigger. The net result: a few extra patches of public lawn, a few monuments, and Confederation Square, which has so complicated downtown traffic that Ottawans themselves call it Confusion Square. Ottawa, dominated by the anachronistic Gothic buildings of Parliament, has remained frowzy, a city where trains run through the center of town and chuff smoke into the foyer of the best hotel.

Three years ago Prime Minister King Hired Jacques Greber, Parisian cityplanner, to draw up blueprints for a capital that Canadians could be proud of. Last week, before a Senate Committee, the white-mustached, 65-year-old Frenchman gave a few hints of what Ottawa could look like in 1998.

Greber would make many changes, but they would be gradual. Examples:

1) the railway station, now in the center of the city, would be shifted to an open field four miles away

2) paper mills, and the other industries that now line the Ottawa River would be removed to make room for a park. The capital area's 900 square miles of farm and wood lands, lakes, rivers and city blocks would be molded into one panorama, to be viewed from a 140-ft. World War II memorial tower atop one of the nearby Gatineau hills.

Senators showed little interest in Greber's heavily accented notions, never asked a question. Next fall, when the full Greber report will be ready, they would probably put some of the questions Ottawans are already asking: 1) how much will it cost? 2) how will it stand up to an atom bomb?

* A brilliant Oxford-trained historian, Goldwin Smith went to the U.S. in 1868 to teach at Cornell, later moved to Canada where he edited the Canadian Monthly. Despite the unpopularity of such views in Canada, he always argued that the ultimate union of the U.S. and the Dominion, and the breaking of Canadian ties with Britain, were economically inevitable.

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