After leaving Montreal we were headed to Canada’s capital, Ottowa. We had to go through a couple of locks on the way and the Carillon Canal lock was a monster of a lock. It has a 200-tonne guillotine gate that raises or lowers the boat 20 vertical metres in just 20 minutes. Each time the lock is used it displaces over 17million litres of water!
Ottowa is on the Rideau Canal, which meant going through eight locks to get to the dock where we moored right in the centre of town. The locks are quite a tourist attraction and as a result you have an audience when locking in and out. The locks are manually operated and the Parks Canada staff crank the historic wooden gates and sluice valves by hand using traditional winches just as they did when the canal opened in 1832
The Rideau Canal was built from 1826 to 1832 under the guidance of Lieutenant Colonel John By. It was created as a secure military supply route following the War of 1812 to bypass the vulnerable St. Lawrence River. The construction camp at its northern end eventually grew into Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. It has a total of 47 locks across 23 lock stations along the route. The Canal is a 200km man-made waterway running through a corridor of communities from Ottawa River to Lake Ontario.
We visited Parliament Hill and had a guided tour of the Houses of Commons, which was being used by students during our visit and they were holding a lively debate, a lot of shouting and heckling much like our own House of Commons. The HoC is normally in the Central building but this is under refurbishment so the HoC was moved to the West Building.
We also visited the East Block which is home to four heritage rooms that offer a glimpse of life at Parliament in the 19th century. It still houses the offices of senators and their staff. The first room was the office of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald who worked there from 1866 to 1873 and again from 1878 to 1883. At the time, the central heating plant of the East Block could maintain a temperature of only 11°C during the winter—fortunately, the room had a fireplace!
There are various sculptures around Ottowa. The big spider is Maman, a massive 30-foot-tall bronze, stainless steel, and marble sculpture. Created by artist Louise Bourgeois in 1999. The Centennial Flame was originally built as a temporary monument. Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson lit the flame for the first time on December 31, 1966, to open the celebrations of Canada’s 100th anniversary of Confederation. The Centennial Flame burns atop a fountain. Each side of the fountain has a bronze shield with the coat of arms of a province or territory.
The “Women are Persons” sculpture was created in 2000. It is a tribute to the Famous Five (for those of you old enough to know it’s not that famous five, Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog) Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney, Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy and Henrietta Muir Edwards, all from Alberta. They brought a case before the highest court in the British Empire to appeal a 1928 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that had ruled that women could not be appointed to the Senate, because they were not “qualified persons.” On October 18, 1929, the Privy Council reversed this decision.
After leaving Ottowa we continued on the Rideau Canal. The next lock was Hogs Back which is adjacent to Hog’s Back Falls, which are a series of artificial waterfalls.
It took us five days to get through the Rideau canal. It was beautiful and very narrow in some places, so much so that we needed to hit the horn to let other boats know were coming through.
Once we passed the final lock on the Rideau Canal at Kingston Mills we had to get through the LaSalle Causeway bridge which has a clearance of just 14ft. By chance we were told about the bridge and discovered that it only opens once a week on a Sunday. When I say it opens, it doesn’t actually open, they remove it. Cranes and heavy machinery lift the modular span completely off its mounts to allow marine traffic through. However, we had some luck as they also remove it on Canada Day, 1st July, which was a Wednesday so we got through a bit earlier.
