OTTAWA—It doesn’t look like a great place for a birthday party, but a boarded-up demolition site in Glasgow is much on the minds of Canadians gearing up to mark the 200th anniversary of John A. Macdonald’s birth in 2015.

Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, was born in Glasgow exactly 199 years ago this weekend, and a building believed to be part of his childhood has been under the threat of a wrecking ball for the past few years.

Now, with less than a year to go until his birthday celebrations in Canada, the boarded-up building on Brunswick Lane is assuming even more significance to the guardians of Macdonald’s memory as the last physical reminder of his early years in Scotland.

Paul Kane, a spokesman for Glasgow’s city council, told the Star this week that Macdonald’s legacy is factoring into future plans for the site.

“The city council — and, I understand, the Scottish government — are very aware that Jan. 11, 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth in Glasgow,” Kane wrote in an email. “We will continue to discuss with the site owners what form any commemoration to Sir John may take on the site around Brunswick Lane.”

The site owners are Selfridge’s, a company owned by Canadian businessman Galen Weston. Though the company didn’t reply to messages this week about its intentions for the demolition site, it has offered public reassurances in the past about preserving Macdonald’s memory on Brunswick Lane.

The question of how that memory is preserved, however, remains an open one.

Fears persist that the building will be long gone by the time the 200th birthday rolls around. A small story in Scotland’s Herald newspaper at the end of 2013 reported that the overall demolition site was now “clear for events.”

Glasgow is hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2014 and the Herald reported that the site may be used for “pop-up shops and other attractions” during and after the Games.

In Canada, the Sir John A. Macdonald Bicentennial Commission — a non-profit, non-partisan group organizing 200th-birthday events for 2015 — says it has been heartened so far by the ways that Glasgow and Scotland are becoming part of the party planned for next year.

“While we are unaware of any recent movement on the property in Glasgow, our organization has been thrilled at the interest in Sir John A’s 200th birthday we have found in Scotland,” said Kate Burgess, marketing and communications co-ordinator for the commission.

Burgess and Kane noted that a plaque already stands in Glasgow, at Ramshorn Kirk’s cemetery off Ingram Street, around 250 metres from Macdonald’s former residence in Brunswick Lane.

As well, Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond is one of the honorary commissioners on the Canadian bicentennial organizing group.

While the buildings on Brunswick Lane have often been called Macdonald’s birthplace, their past is as confusing as their future. Even the road itself is known as a lane and a street in official records.

Richard Gwyn, a Star columnist and author of two books on Macdonald, has written that historians are unsure exactly where in Glasgow he was born.

Kane, citing historical research, said Macdonald was actually born in Laurieston, south of the river Clyde in Glasgow, in 1815. At some point, the family moved to Bath St., and then to Brunswick Lane, before finally setting sail to Canada when the young John A. Macdonald was just five years old.

And it is unclear whether the buildings still standing on Brunswick Lane were actually home to Macdonald’s family. Kane says that the tenement where the Macdonald family lived was demolished many years ago.

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However, the still-standing pub at Brunswick Lane was identified as Macdonald’s birthplace in a 1967 CBC-TV special, which featured an appearance at the pub by Hugh Gainsford, Macdonald’s great-grandson, as the guide and narrator to his ancestor’s early days.

“We checked the records and found he had been born in a three-storey, brick building in a narrow alley in central Glasgow here in Brunswick St.,” Gainsford says in the documentary. “The building was there all right, but there’s no plaque or anything to indicate that a great Canadian had been born here.”

It is this documentary, it seems, that gave the Brunswick Lane building a historical stamp, which the keepers of Macdonald’s memory are keen to preserve.