The Government Conference Centre (French: Centre de conférence du gouvernement) is a government building in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, located at 2 Rideau Street. It is situated at the intersection of Wellington Street and the Rideau Canal, just a short distance from the Parliament buildings and Confederation Square, and across the street from the Château Laurier hotel, completed around the same time.
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.