Senate of Canada Building

The Senate of Canada Building (French: édifice du Sénat du Canada) is a government building and former railway station that serves as the temporary seat of the Senate of Canada. Located at 2 Rideau Street in downtown Ottawa, it was known as Ottawa Union Station and served as the city's central railway station from 1912 until 1966. From 1966 to 2018, it was operated by the Government of Canada as the Government Conference Centre. The building currently includes a temporary Senate chamber (housed in the concourse of the former railway station), as well as some Senate offices and committee rooms (in the waiting room of the former station).

It is situated at the intersection of Wellington Street and the Rideau Canal, across the street from the Château Laurier hotel (which was constructed around the same time). It is 600 metres (2,000 ft) from Parliament Hill and Confederation Square.

Before the turn of the twentieth century, several railway companies had run lines into the city and had begun to build railway stations. In chronological order:

Broad Street, in the Lebreton Flats area, was the site of several stations including the first Union station (1881), which perished by fire in 1896 and again in 1900 and was rebuilt each time. The last one closed in 1920. Broad Street was near the Prince of Wales Bridge, the link to Montreal via the north shore of the Ottawa River. Broad Street itself no longer exists, erased as part of the National Capital Commission's efforts at improving the capital area.

Ottawa became part of the Canadian Pacific Railway's transcontinental rail service on June 28, 1886, when the first Pacific Express arrived at Broad Street from Montreal via Lachute and Hull, Quebec, on its way to Sudbury, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Port Moody, B.C. It used the existing Prince of Wales Bridge to cross the Ottawa River near the site of the present-day O-Train Bayview Station, west of Parliament Hill. This rail bridge had been built in 1880 by the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Occidental Railway and was transferred to Canadian Pacific in 1882.

However, there was no centrally located station until 1895, through efforts of John Rudolphus Booth. Booth was a Canadian lumber baron known for creating Canada's largest sawmill right in Ottawa, near Chaudière Falls. His mill's capacity exceeded the distribution infrastructure, and he looked to rail as a solution. (Eighteen years previous, he had established the Canada Atlantic Railway.) Booth had built a central depot in 1895 just south of Rideau Street, on the east side of the canal and reachable by way of a covered stairway from Sappers Bridge. The station seemed to not be truly serving the needs of the railway companies, since it was built for the interests of the Canada Atlantic Railway.

CPR's Royal Alexandra Interprovincial Bridge built in 1901 became the second railway bridge to cross the Ottawa River between Ottawa and Hull. It led to Booth's central depot. In 1905, Booth sold the Canada Atlantic Railway to the Grand Trunk Railway.

In 1910, the Grand Trunk was apportioned part of the Rideau Canal in order to build a new station and hotel. The hotel would become the famous Chateau Laurier, and the station would become Ottawa's Union Station.