STORY BY SHARON ADAMS
Although Parliament was in session debating the price of fish on the evening of Feb. 3, 1916, Nova Scotia MP Francis Glass was ensconced in the cozy reading room at the House of Commons. He noticed a fire had started in a wastebasket and called for help.
Within minutes the entire room was ablaze and instead of smothering the fire, the extinguisher scattered the embers, first igniting newspapers hanging from dowels along the walls, then nearby magazines and a collection of 20,000 books, some dating back more than a century.
In just a few hours, Canada’s seat of power, considered one of the finest examples of Gothic Revival architecture in the British Empire, was a pile of smouldering ruins.
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