Government Conference Centre

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The Government Conference Centre was originally built as the city's railway station.

The Government Conference Centre is a government building in downtown Ottawa, Canada. The building is located at the intersection of Wellington Street and the Rideau Canal, just a short distance from the Parliament buildings and across the street from the Château Laurier hotel.

The building was opened by the Grand Trunk Railway in 1912 as Ottawa's railway station, and the hotel was built across the street to serve travellers. The station was designed by the firm of Ross and Macdonald, who also designed the Château Laurier and later designed Toronto's Union Station.

Both Canadian National Railways and Canadian Pacific Railway operated regularly scheduled passenger trains through the facility until the late 1960s. In 1966, the National Capital Commission decided to remove the tracks along both sides of the canal, replacing them with scenic parkways, and build a new Ottawa station in the east end of the city. While the NCC had originally planned to tear down the structure, it was spared, becoming the centre of Canada's centenary celebrations in 1967. After sitting empty for many years, it was turned into the Government Conference Centre in the 1980s.

It has since been home to many gatherings of civil servants and politicians. Most prominently it was where the official negotiations of the Canada Act and later the Meech Lake Accord and Charlottetown Accord took place. The building was somewhat tarnished by the failure of the two accords, and since then the building has been consistently underused and expensive to maintain.

The cavernous structure has never been well suited to its role as a conference centre. In the mid-1990s a proposal was made to turn it into the new home for the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, but these plans fell through. In his final year in office, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien announced that the building would become home to a new museum of Canadian political history, but incoming Prime Minister Paul Martin cancelled this project, and it has remained a conference centre.

As well as hosting conferences, the building is also sometimes used as a gallery. A section of the Berlin wall is on permanent display inside the main entrance.

Architecturally, the building is in the Beaux-Arts style. The main departures hall (now the main conference area) is a 3/4 replica of the Roman Baths of Caracalla and therefore a half-size equivalent of the now-destroyed departures hall of New York Penn Station. Unfortunately, the conversion to a conference centre has resulted in changes to the departures hall (such as the addition of a wooden translation platform on the east side of the room) which disturb the original Beaux Arts design.