It began life 190 years ago as Bytown, founded to house labourers who had been recruited to build the Rideau Canal. For its first few decades, it was a crude, notoriously lawless frontier settlement. Even after Queen Victoria chose it as capital of the united Province of Canada in 1857, the renamed city of Ottawa lacked basic municipal services such as paved streets, piped water and sewers. Lumber, fire and politics shaped its destiny, but not always advantageously. When Allan Gotlieb arrived in 1957 to take up a job at External Affairs, the future Canadian ambassador to the United States was appalled. "An unkempt, decaying village," he sputtered in his 2006 diplomatic memoir, The Washington...
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