By P.C. Pethick
Whoever said Canadian history is boring never heard Josephine MacFadden tell the story of Ottawa’s enigmatic founder Col. John By.
Col. By was the resourceful military officer overseeing the design and construction of the Rideau Canal between 1828 and 1832, a period marked by extraordinarily harsh conditions. His triumph turned to tragedy when changing tides in England caused the empire to stray away from colonial support. Shortly after completion of the canal, accusations of overspending eventually led to his disgrace in London.
But his contribution to Ottawa won’t go uncelebrated by MacFadden, an Ottawa film and documentary producer. She is currently working on a way to bring the colonel’s tragic story to life in a full-length feature film.
Setting her sights high, MacFadden hopes to attract the interests of a major backer so the film can be ready for international distribution by the new millennium.
“It’s very important to present generations and the generations to come that we understand the difficulties and human effort that went into the founding of the capital,” says MacFadden who has given the film the working title Triumph and Tragedy: The John By Story.
MacFadden has been intrigued by the colonel’s story for the past two decades.
“He achieved the impossible with this amazing engineering feat,” says MacFadden. “He founded the capital and basically got shafted.”
In 1981, MacFadden made her first attempt at bringing the story to the big screen, but the project proved too big for the then infant Canadian film industry.
She tried again in 1994, with the well-received television documentary, John By, Hero Without Honour, The Rideau Canal Story.
The latest attempt at producing the film has the support of Ottawa 2000, a group overseeing the capital’s plan to welcome the new millennium.
“We’re looking at some permanent legacy projects,” says Shirley Westeinde, chairwoman for Ottawa 2000. “We were certainly impressed with the ideas [MacFadden] presented to us.”
Although the film will shed new light on a largely forgotten aspect of Canadian history, parts of the story — such as By’s personal life — will be fictionalized.
Serge Barbe, reference archivist for the City of Ottawa says there are no ethical problems with fictionalizing the characters to some extent.
“If you’re just going to dwell on the known facts then that may not be enough for a story,” says Barbe. “It’s up to the creator to produce the continuity.”
The Friends of Bytown, a group of interested locals brought together by MacFadden, are spearheading the efforts to raise funds for the writing of the script. They are looking to the community for the $25,000 which will eventually be needed to bring the film out of development and into production.
Support has been trickling in — one anonymous donor offered $1,000 after MacFadden went public with her plan a couple of weeks ago.
The scene-by-scene script has been commissioned to Ottawa scriptwriter John Sifton.
Sifton has worked with a number of well-known Canadian directors including Michel Brault on his film Patriote, about the 1837 uprising in Lower Canada.
Once the script is completed, MacFadden says she plans to present it to major Canadian and British film producers in hopes of attracting a co-producer with enough money to fund an epic film.
“You just need some seed funding to get to that point where you can bring in the big Canadian companies,” says MacFadden. “We’re asking locally that people help us get to first base.”