Ontario Legislative Building

The suite is also home to portraits of some the past Lieutenant Governors of Ontario[9] as well as:

• Queen Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh, and the Lieutenant Governor[10]
• large portrait of Upper Canada's first Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe by painted Sir Edmund Wyly Grier (loan from the Toronto Public Library.)[10]

The first dedicated parliamentary buildings for the Legislature of Upper Canada was completed in 1794, although it was later destroyed after the Battle of York in 1813.

The present Ontario Legislative Building is the seventh such structure to serve as Ontario's parliament building. Either Navy Hall or the Freemasons Hall in Newark, Upper Canada (today Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), served as the first legislature,[11] where the initial meeting of the House of Assembly occurred on 17 September 1791. Only three years later, however, construction began on a dedicated parliament building in York (now Toronto), as it was felt by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe that the presence of a provincial capital directly across the border from the United States was too great a risk, especially as the relations between the US and Britain were then tense. By June the complex, located at the intersection of Front and Parliament Streets, was completed, and the humble wood structures were dubbed the Palace of Parliament (The structure resembled two military barracks).

The relocation to York did not ensure the protection of the capital, however, and the Palace of Parliament was destroyed by fire on 27 April 1813, as a consequence of an attack on the city in the War of 1812. The House of Assembly then met once in the ballroom of the York Hotel (between King and Front Streets), and regularly, from then until 1820, at the home of Chief Justice of the Court of the King's Bench William Henry Draper, which was located at the present intersection of Wellington and York Streets. The new parliament buildings was a two-storey Georgian architecture structure, put up on the site of the previous structure, stood only for four years, succumbing to an accidental fire on 30 December 1824.[11]

In 1832, the third parliament building for Upper Canada was completed. It was used by the legislature until 1840, when the colony united with Lower Canada to form the Province of Canada.

From then until 1829, the House of Assembly gathered at the newly built York General Hospital, located on the south-east corner of the block bounded by King, Adelaide, John, and Peter Streets; a move that delayed the hospital's opening until the legislative body moved on to the old Court House, which stood on the north side of King Street, between Toronto and Church Streets. In 1832, a new structure was built on Front Street, west of Simcoe Street, and served continuously as the third parliament building of Upper Canada until the province was united with Lower Canada in 1840, after which the joined assembly was relocated by the then Governor General, Charles Poulett Thomson, Baron Sydenham, to the general hospital building in Kingston.[11] The House of Assembly moved in and out of the Front Street building over the ensuing years, relocating for brief periods to Montreal and Quebec City, even at one point adopting a perambulation system that saw parliament relocate between Toronto and Quebec every four years. With mounting displeasure over the transient nature of the Canadian parliament, and an inability on the part of politicians to agree as to where to locate the legislative building, Queen Victoria was asked to make a selection; over all the other cities in the Province of Canada, she chose Bytown (later Ottawa) in 1857.[11]

Today, the site of the first parliament buildings in York is a parking lot for a car wash, a car rental company and a car dealership. Archaeological excavations at the site in 2000 undercovered evidence of the buildings. Subsequently, the property was bought by the Ontario Heritage Trust which operated a Parliament Interpretive Centre at the site from 2012–2015. The dig was covered up to await future plans for the site.[12]

On 1 July 1867, however, the province joined with two others in confederation and was split into the present-day provinces of Ontario and Quebec, meaning that new legislatures were established for each of the two new provincial entities. Toronto was chosen as the capital of the former, and the legislative assembly moved back to the same Front Street property that had been home to the House of Assembly for the Province of Canada, despite the structure having been damaged by fire in 1861 and 1862. By 1880, a request was made for designs for a new parliament building for the province of Ontario, and, when none of the entries was found to be less than CA$500,000 , the legislature approved during 1885 a budget of CA$750,000 for the chosen scheme by Richard A. Waite.

Queen's Park and Ontario Legislative Building, c. 1890s. The building was officially opened in 1893.

Construction then commenced in 1886, and the Ontario Legislative Building was (though still incomplete) officially opened on 4 April 1893 by the then Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, George Airey Kirkpatrick. The final cost was tallied at approximately CA$1,250,000 ,[11] and the design was criticised by some as "too American".[3] This left the old parliament building on Front Street vacant, and it stood as such for nearly a decade before it was demolished from 1900 to 1903. The site was then sold to the Grand Trunk Railway, which used the former parliamentary land for freight sheds and marshalling yards. The location is now occupied by the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, a public square, and a number of high-rise buildings.[13]

With an increasing population in the province, it became necessary in 1909 to add a wing to the north side of the Ontario Legislative Building, enclosing the courtyard. As construction was underway, on 1 September men repairing galvanised roofing on the west wing accidentally sparked a fire that eventually destroyed the interior of that part of the edifice, including the legislative library. It then took until 1912 for repairs and reconstructions to be made, and the new wing to be completed.[11] Further expansions of the parliamentary infrastructure were from then on built across the east side of Queen's Park Crescent, with the Whitney Block built in 1925, the Macdonald and Hepburn Blocks completed in 1968, the Mowat and Hearst Blocks in 1969.