I was a very good tennis player in Ottawa, Canada - nationally ranked when I was, like, 13. Then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 15, and everyone in L.A. just killed me. I was pretty great in Canada. Not so much in Los Angeles.
When I appointed the Minister of the Environment to major cabinet status, the Planning and Priorities committee, the signals that that sent through Ottawa were major, because that's what the bureaucracy understands.
Canadians want to elect good people to be their voice in Ottawa.
My family was a good family, I had a great Canadian education and I came up in a great, little town like Ottawa.
I became a big Kings fan, and then later on my hometown of Ottawa got a team, so then I was very, very torn. I just love both of those teams very much.
On the way from Chicago, I spent the summer of 1947 in Ottawa, helping to build the first of a series of econometric models for the Canadian government.
I used to live on a reserve, but I went back and forth between my reserve and Ottawa where my father lived, so I kind of had a double life growing up.
If Ottawa giveth, then Ottawa can taketh away.
I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.
I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa, you try to make every barbecue, festival, parade and charity run, but sometimes you feel pulled in 14 directions at once.