CANADA'S FORGOTTEN CAPITAL

Beneath the streets of Old Montreal, the rubble of a short-lived Parliament building offers a glimpse into a young country’s growing pains

- JASON URBANUS

IN THE LATE 1980s or early 1990s, Canadian politician Robert Kaplan was driving through upstate New York on his way from Toronto to his apartment in New York City. As he often did, he stopped to browse through the antiques at a flea market off the New York State Thruway. There, a Quebecois vendor showed his fellow Canadian a special item. It was a badly damaged three-foot-tall wooden carving depicting a lion and a unicorn as well as emblems representing England, Scotland, and Ireland. The antiques dealer shared a secret about its history that had been passed down in his family for generations. He told Kaplan that the object was the official royal coat of arms that had once hung in the old Province of Canada’s Parliament building in Montreal and that it had been pillaged when a violent politicized mob burned the building to the ground in 1849. Kaplan, like most modern-day Canadians, was largely unfamiliar with that incident.

Although he was skeptical about its origins, Kaplan nonetheless purchased the piece. He hung it on his wall and didn’t give it much thought for almost two decades—that is, until 2011, when he read an article in a Canadian newspaper announcing the excavation of a long-forgotten former Parliament building in Montreal that had supposedly been destroyed in the nineteenth century. At that moment he began to wonder whether the antiques seller had been telling the truth those many years ago, and whether he had in his possession an arcane piece of Canadian history.