The Lord Elgin Hotel Cornerstone and Time Capsule - Ottawa, Ontario - Time Capsules on Waymarking.com

The time capsule was placed in a hollowed out space when the cornerstone was laid on February 27, 1941 by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. The are no dates on the cornerstone as to when the time capsule should/will be opened.

"It’s a rare private enterprise in Canada that can claim to have had a sitting prime minister lay its cornerstone. But in the case of The Lord Elgin, so much a product of Mackenzie King’s broad vision for the national capital as well as his direct influence on the project’s planning and architecture, the PM’s presence at the historic occasion might have been expected.

And on the bitterly cold afternoon of Feb. 27, 1941, the prime minister was chauffeured to the Elgin Street construction site and, on a raised platform in front of a sizeable crowd, he accepted an ornate silver trowel from Jack Udd.

A specially prepared block of limestone was then lowered into place at the northeast edge of the building’s footprint. The cornerstone, set about hip-height atop a few previously laid rows of the hotel’s outer wall, was engraved simply: “THE LORD ELGIN A.D. 1941.”

Inside the stone was a hollowed-out space where an assortment of “coins of the realm,” copies of the day’s newspapers and one other document — an elaborately lettered scroll prepared at Ottawa alderman Chester Pickering’s request — were placed as a time capsule for some future generation to discover.

Inscribed on the scroll was a message that captured the awful dread of that moment in history, when the threat of a German invasion of the British Isles still loomed, but even moreso the Allied spirit of resilience, courage and confidence: “We who are living today have faith there’ll always be an England — Democracy will always prevail.”

King, writing in his diary, commented on the scroll’s promise to future Canadians: “It is, I believe, a true bit of prophecy.”

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