Kingston marks 175 years since losing status as capital city of Canada

Kingston had it, then lost it on this week 175 years ago.

We’re talking about the city’s status as the capital of Canada. On March 5, 1844, it was agreed that the capital of the Province of Canada would be moved from Kingston to Montreal — and then, of course, it later went to Ottawa.

Peter Gower is a Kingston historian. At the time, he says, the move apparently made sense.

“Lord Sydenham, who’d been sent over to sort things out, avoided Toronto, he avoided Montreal because both of those places had riots in the late 1830s,” Gower told Global News. “He avoided Quebec City because it was French, he avoided London because it was too far west and out in the wilderness and Kingston was the sort of place that was left, so it became capital almost by default.”

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Whether by default or not, Kingston served as capital from 1841 until 1844, when it was moved to Montreal. Gower says there were a number of reasons the Limestone City lost the status.

“It was small-ish,” he said, listing one example. “It didn’t have the infrastructure. It also wasn’t Montreal or Quebec City where people prefer to be. It wasn’t Toronto, which was probably expected to grow much more than Kingston would but it had a background of the 1837 riots, so Kingston was a compromise.”

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Gower says it didn’t help that Lord Sydenham, the former governor general of the Province of Canada who was a big Kingston backer, died in 1841. He adds without Sydenham, there was nobody to defend against all the suggestions there were better places to go.

Ottawa became Canada’s capital in 1857.