Ottawa—City of Gold Diggers?

Ottawa, as the site of the Bank of Canada, played a central role in Operation Fish, an undertaking initiated in 1940 to provide safekeeping for the assets of Britain, Norway, France, and Belgium in Canada for the duration of World War II. Six ships carried combined gold and securities from the four allied countries via Britain; secretly unloaded in Halifax, the reserves were transported to Montreal by train, then to Ottawa, where the 60 million ounces of gold were loaded onto trucks at night and ferried to the basement of the Bank of Canada on Wellington Street under the watchful eye of armed guards disguised in simple overalls. The crates were unloaded and stacked by two 30-member teams who, although they worked 24 hours a day, were unable to keep up with the number of crates delivered. The backlog of 1,500 unopened crates of gold that lined the halls of the basement soon required a contingent of RCMP officers to guard it round the clock. But it’s hard to keep any secret for long. One can only presume that once the war ended, the gold was just as secretly slipped back out of the country and returned to its owners.