Where are Canada's Parliament buildings located?

Discover Canada places the Parliament buildings on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The guide refers to "Parliament Hill, Ottawa" directly in its photo caption, and notes elsewhere that in Canada's parliamentary democracy, the people elect members to the House of Commons in Ottawa and to the provincial and territorial legislatures. So the federal Parliament — Sovereign, Senate and House of Commons — sits in Ottawa.

Ottawa's identity as the national capital traces back to the 1850s and 1860s. Discover Canada records that "the Duke of Wellington... chose Bytown (Ottawa) as the endpoint of the Rideau Canal, part of a network of forts to prevent the U.S.A. from invading Canada again," and that "Wellington, who defeated Napoleon in 1815, therefore played a direct role in founding the national capital." So the modern Ottawa traces back to a defensive engineering project that grew into Canada's seat of government.

Parliament's status in Ottawa is treated by Discover Canada as one of the country's defining facts. The guide pairs "Parliament Hill, Ottawa" with images of Queen Elizabeth II opening the 23rd Parliament in 1957 and other ceremonial moments. So the location is bound up with both the day-to-day work of federal lawmaking and the constitutional moments captured in those images.

The Parliament buildings themselves house the chambers where bills move through the seven steps of the legislative process — First Reading, Second Reading, Committee Stage, Report Stage, Third Reading, then a similar Senate process, and finally Royal Assent — all of it physically taking place in Ottawa.

The question is testing whether new citizens know the Canadian capital. Discover Canada is unambiguous: Parliament Hill is in Ottawa, and the House of Commons sits in Ottawa.

The wrong answer choices each pick a different Canadian city. Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto are all major cities — but none of them is the seat of the federal Parliament. The right answer is the city where the Parliament buildings stand: Ottawa.