Hot Room used to run ‘biggest bootlegging joint in Canada’

Back in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, the Hot Room was a hard-drinking, smoking, and gambling place. Don Newman, now 78, who first got a job on the Hill as a young reporter for The Globe and Mail in 1969, remembers having to push past the crowd of drinkers in the Hot Room to file his stories.

Reporters pictured in April 1965. Built in the 1920s after the fire destroyed most of Centre Block in 1916, the Hot Room was supposed to accommodate 35 members. But there were 130 people in the Hot Room at one point. It was so crowded the excess of reporters had desks, files, and piles of newspapers out in the hallway. The fire marshal warned the gallery once a year about the fire hazard, according to Peter Dempson's Assignment Ottawa: Seventeen Years in the Press Gallery.Photograph courtesy of Don Newlands/KixPix

Feature

BY KATE MALLOY

June 10, 2019

Back in the old days, clerks in the Parliamentary Press Gallery operated a “blind pig” out of the Hot Room in Centre Block, known at the time as the “biggest bootlegging joint in Canada,” according to Peter Dempson's sensational book, Assignment Ottawa: Seventeen in the Press Gallery

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