Remembering Ottawa: Stories and Legacies

Commemoration is a way to honour community stories and legacies. Commemorative activity helps to build and reinforce collective memory, passing along knowledge of achievements and difficult pasts from generation to generation.

As part of its cultural development mandate, the City of Ottawa is developing a municipal commemoration policy to guide commemorative programs and activities in our city. Diverse stories, histories, cultures, communities and legacies abound in Ottawa. Remembering Ottawa: Stories and Legacies will ensure that these collective and compelling memories are honoured.

Ottawa is unique:

• It rests on the unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Host Nation;
• Ottawa is home to a diverse urban Indigenous community of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people;
• It is also home to diverse immigrant and equity-deserving communities;
• The Ottawa landscape connects neighbouring urban, suburban and rural lifestyles; and
• Ottawa serves as both Canada’s National Capital and also a multilingual, medium-sized North American city with French and English as official languages.

As residents of Ottawa, we hope that you will participate in this policy development process as we move through the various stages of research, consultation and engagement in 2021 and 2022. You are invited to follow the progress of this cultural development work by visiting Engage Ottawa regularly for updates. You are also encouraged to contribute by sharing your constructive input and by participating in engagement activities over the next months.

We would like to hear from you! We’re interested in your contributions, your stories and your legacies. It’s important that the new municipal commemoration policy reflects the diversity that is in Ottawa.

We started the conversation in July 2021 by posting a first question: What would you like to see in the City of Ottawa’s Municipal Commemoration Policy? Your responses have been compiled and are available here.

Our second question was posted from October 2021 to March 2022 in an open format that allowed contributors to respond to each other’s comments. The question was, “Most of us are familiar with commemoration that involves plaques, statues, memorials and the like. What other traditional, cultural, artistic or innovative methods of commemoration would you propose?” Your responses are available here.

Our third question is now posted below in the Your Ideas section. We look forward to receiving your responses. Or please feel free to contact us via this email: remembering.sesouvenir@ottawa.ca.