Ottawa

Queen Victoria picked Canada's capital by choosing the city nobody wanted. In 1857, after parliament deadlocked through more than 200 votes on whether Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, or Kingston deserved the honor, Victoria selected Bytown—a rough lumber outpost on a cliff above the Ottawa River, population roughly 10,000. The choice satisfied no faction precisely because it offended all of them equally. Ottawa sat on the border between English Upper Canada and French Lower Canada, far enough from the American border to be defensible, and obscure enough that no rival city could claim favoritism. Parliament ratified the decision in 1859 by five votes—a change of three would have killed it.

That founder effect locked in a peculiar dual economy. Federal government employment dominates the workforce, with over 130,000 public servants in the National Capital Region—47.6% of Canada's entire federal workforce concentrated in one metropolitan area. The Ottawa-Gatineau metro straddles two provinces—Ottawa in English-speaking Ontario, Gatineau in French-speaking Quebec—creating a bilingual organism split by a river. Over 100,000 people cross the Ottawa River daily to work, the vast majority flowing from Gatineau into Ottawa. Resources move one direction through a semi-permeable membrane, like nutrients crossing a cell wall under osmotic pressure.

Ottawa's tech sector demonstrates ecological succession after a keystone species collapse. Nortel Networks earned the city its 'Silicon Valley North' nickname before disintegrating into bankruptcy in 2009—a $250 billion company reduced to patent liquidation. The carcass fertilized what followed: former Nortel and Newbridge engineers founded dozens of startups, and Shopify emerged as the new apex predator. Kanata North, Canada's largest technology park, houses over 540 companies and 33,000 employees contributing $13 billion annually to GDP. The pattern resembles a forest after a canopy giant falls—the gap floods with light, and new growth explodes from the nutrient-rich debris.

The lumber camp that became a capital because a queen needed to end an argument now houses 1.07 million people. Over one-third of the Ottawa-Gatineau workforce operates remotely, and federal job cuts are reshaping the government-dependent economy. Ottawa faces a test of metabolic flexibility: whether a city built on paper-pushing and policy can diversify its energy sources before the public sector contracts further, or whether it remains a beaver economy—industrious, infrastructure-heavy, and dependent on a single resource.