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In Ottawa of 1867, the entire population amounted to almost exactly the average attendance at Senators games last year — 18,247. Out of those 18,000, who could actually vote in the first general election? The eligibility criteria varied in detail then from province to province, but you needed tonot be at least three things; female, under 21 and something other than a British subject. There were also conditions related to money, in the form of property or annual income. If you made more than $250 a year in Ontario (the former Upper Canada) you were good to go to the polling station. (That’s me out, then.) Once at the polling station you voted with your mouth, not a pencil or by touching a screen, announcing your vote to all and sundry. The possibilities for intimidation and bribery were rife, and were entertained. The attack ads and rhetoric in those days, on the stump and in the pages of the Citizen, made today’s mudballs seem like soap bubbles.

When all the results were finally in, the winner in the city of Ottawa was Joseph Merrill Currier, a member of the coalition Liberal-Conservative party. (Two words you don’t often see hyphenated these days.) Currier was our sole MP, there being only one riding in Ottawa until 1872.

Currier was American born, arriving in Canada around 1837 in his late teens. By the time of the general election he had been a busy man, hooking into the timber trade with mills in Manotick, New Edinburgh and launching a start-up lumber business in Hull with Alonzo Wright. His business in Manotick was short-lived; when he brought his second wife, Annie, to the mill for the first time, in 1863, she was killed in an industrial accident when her frock caught in machinery. Joseph never went near Manotick again.