Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ottawa was selected as capital on the 31st of December 1857 by Queen Victoria, acting on the advice of Governor General Edmund Head. Two primary reasons drove the choice: Ottawa's isolated location surrounded by dense forest on a cliff far from the Canada-US border made it defensible, and its position on the boundary between Canada West and Canada East made it a political compromise between French and English populations.
Ottawa was originally founded in 1826 as a town and named Bytown in 1827, after Colonel John By, the British military engineer responsible for the Rideau Canal construction. It was incorporated as a town in 1850 and renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it also obtained city status.
The name Ottawa comes from the Ottawa River, whose name derives from the Algonquin word adawe, meaning "to trade." The city was renamed Ottawa in 1855. In modern Algonquin, the city is known as Odawag.
According to the 2021 Census, Ottawa had a city population of 1,017,449, making it the fourth-largest city in Canada. The Ottawa-Gatineau census metropolitan area had a population of 1,488,307, also ranking fourth among Canadian metropolitan areas.
The Rideau Canal is a 202 km waterway connecting the Ottawa River near Parliament Hill to Kingston on Lake Ontario, built in the 1820s-1830s under Colonel John By to provide a secure supply route bypassing the vulnerable St. Lawrence River corridor. It opened in 1832 and was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the 29th of June 2007. During winter, the Ottawa section of the canal becomes the world's largest skating rink, stretching 7.8 km.
Ottawa earned the nickname Silicon Valley North due to the concentration of technology companies that grew in the city during the 1990s and 2000s. By 2015, approximately 1,800 technology firms employed around 63,400 people, most specializing in telecommunications, software, and environmental technology. Companies including Nortel, Corel, Mitel, Shopify, and Newbridge Networks were founded in Ottawa.