Lost and Fonds

In 1967, as the nation celebrated its one-hundredth birthday, the federal government opened the new Public Archives and National Library, just west of the Supreme Court of Canada. The building’s Soviet-style facade disguised two stunning reading rooms, with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the Ottawa River. Inside, it was a thoroughly modern facility, in both form and function. The nine-storey granite structure, designed by the noted architecture firm Mathers & Haldenby, was the perfect complement to another move the government made that same year: reducing the period researchers had to wait for the release of federal records, from five decades to three.

The halcyon days of Canadian hist­ory soon followed. The deluge of materials that came into the public domain lured scholars — those studying political and military hist­ory, as well as those taking up the call of social and labour hist­ory — to the Parliamentary Precinct. They came to study the First...