Manor Park Community Council’s new home has a deep history
In March of 2020, Manor Park likely seemed suddenly quieter than many Canadian neighbourhoods.
The weekly stream of teen participants in the Encounters with Canada program at 1805 Gaspé Ave. came to a sudden stop with the global shutdown of nearly all travel and in-person gatherings because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In January of 2021, Historica Canada announced the permanent closure of the Encounters program, bringing one of the country’s largest youth exchange conferences–touching the lives of over 113,000 Canadian teens, not to mention thousands of volunteers with the program–to an end.
Encounters with Canada was a national youth forum that brought groups of roughly 100 Canadian teenagers to Ottawa for week-long conferences, structured around particular themes throughout the school year. It started out as the brainchild of the organization that became the Council for Canadian Unity.
In 1978, following a national survey showing support for national-scale youth programs to foster Canadian identity and to build knowledge of the country, the council began plans for such a program, eventually named Encounters with Canada.
Terry Fox Canadian Youth Centre
The Council purchased a former school building on Gaspé Avenue in Ottawa’s Manor Park neighbourhood and retrofitted it with dormitories, volunteer quarters, a cafeteria-auditorium space, and other facilities. Renamed the Terry Fox Canadian Youth Centre in 1982, the building welcomed its first cohort of program participants that fall.
The Historica Foundation (now Historica Canada) took over responsibility for Encounters 2006 when it faced funding shortfalls at the council.
The program was based on three components:
- sessions on Canadian institutions in the national capital region
- educational modules on official languages, youth engagement, peace, Canadian history, and others, and
- career-focused sessions on arts and culture, ecology and environment, international affairs, journalism and communications, politics, science and technology, sports and fitness, and many others.
Community hub
After the program’s closure in March 2020, Hitorica Canada put the Terry Fox Youth Centre up for sale. An anonymous buyer purchased it and selected the Manor Park Community Council (MPCC) to be the lead community programmer of the building.
Before demolition and renovation work began, the Canadian Museum of History worked with representatives of both Historica Canada and the MPCC to acquire selected objects from the building.
These include one of the many art works by local Ottawa artist Nicole Bélanger that adorned the halls (other works by her have been kept by the MPCC for the new space).
Teenage flashbacks
As an alumnus of the program (I travelled from Kamloops B.C. to attend a week on Canadian politics in the mid-1990s), going through the halls of the building brought a fascinating moment of teenage flashbacks.
Memories of chaotic meals in the auditorium, guest speakers, and mock political assemblies filled my mind as we went through material in the now empty space. A lone guitar case, with an Encounters sticker proudly featured on its side, brought back memories of improvised talent shows and enthusiastic teacher chaperones herding us to the large dorm spaces at curfew.
The program’s aims–fostering national unity in Canadian youth during an era of perceived national crisis–will be preserved as part of the rich array of Canadian experiences represented in the Museum’s collections.
James Trepanier, PhD, a post-Confederation Canada curator at the Canadian Museum of History, wrote this article.