The Haunted Presence in Parliament’s Old East Block

The Haunted Presence in Parliament’s Old East Block is the recurring, ambiguous experience of spectral activity that surrounds Loïc during his year working in Édifice de l’Est. Empty corridors seem to retain the sounds and shadows of earlier occupants, while the building’s architecture makes history feel almost physically present. For Loïc, the hauntings become more than a private disturbance: they join the political pressures of Ottawa to buried memories and anticipate the painful personal and national divisions that will shape his relationship with Régis D’Anjou.

Setting and First Apparitions

About a month after joining the prime minister’s cabinet, Loïc stays late with Régis to finish the Throne Speech that will open the next day’s session. As they move through the deserted building, he hears strange sounds that rise and fade like a badly tuned radio. He approaches padded office doors and presses his ear to them; the noises vanish at once, as though the unseen source has shifted frequency. He knows the offices are empty, but that knowledge does not make the sounds less disturbing.

Loïc initially considers telling Régis what he has heard, then holds back, wary of ridicule. When he later broaches the subject indirectly, he discovers that his cousin dismisses extrasensory phenomena as hallucination and has a strong aversion to the paranormal and occult. Régis’s skepticism leaves Loïc reluctant to confide in him, and he tells no one else. The experiences nevertheless continue and grow more intense through the year the cabinet works in Édifice de l’Est, before moving across Wellington Street to Édifice Langevin.

The haunting is also rendered visually. In a later recollection, Loïc remembers arriving at Parliament the previous year and seeing a demonic-looking face in the darkened rose window above the high Gothic windows of his office. On another night, after leaving Édifice Langevin and walking down Wellington Street toward a bus, he glances at the windows of his former office and thinks he sees shadows passing behind them. Pale light shifts inside, and the figure in the rose window seems to grimace. He turns quickly toward the arriving bus. The office has changed, but the old building’s image remains vivid enough to intrude on his departure.

A Building That Replays History

The apparitions accumulate as fragments rather than as a single, clearly defined ghost. At times Loïc glimpses top-hatted figures moving through the central aisle. At others he catches snatches of animated English conversation, the clink of bottles, and curses, or hears irritated French whispers, prayers, and repeated supplications in which he thinks he can make out the word mother. The sounds stop and start, and English and French voices seem to contend for the foreground. Their variety leads him to imagine that the building’s walls and partitions preserve the strongest vibrations of those who once occupied it: an uncanny, subliminal broadcast of the past.

In that imagined broadcast, political history returns through human weakness and private conflict. Loïc associates the angry echoes with John A. Macdonald, drinking gin and cursing those in Quebec who protested the hanging of Louis Riel and opposed the transcontinental railway. He imagines Wilfrid Laurier troubled by the Ontario Catholic schools question and wounded by Henri Bourassa’s break with him, seeking consolation from his muse, Émilie Barthe. He also connects the building’s hidden voices to William Lyon Mackenzie King: a politician who consulted mediums, summoned the dead, and tried to speak with his deceased mother, though Leonardo da Vinci did not answer. In Loïc’s spectral portrait, King’s spiritual consultations coexist uneasily with his enthusiasm for Wagner and his secret admiration for Adolf Hitler. These are not presented as independently verified supernatural messages; they are the historical figures and tensions Loïc believes he can discern through the building’s sounds.

Sometimes the experience is less a distinct voice or apparition than a swelling tumult: English and French words succeeding and challenging one another, cries, jeers, rallying calls, and roars. A faintly caught smell, a patch of gloom, or the sudden sensation of having walked those corridors long ago can make the present seem to overlap with another time. Loïc wonders whether the building opens onto a hidden reverse of history, where failed possibilities might have taken shape. He imagines a North America that had become half French and half English, or more French than English, and considers whether the continent might then have been more balanced. The haunting thus holds together historical memory and the unrealized alternatives he can only speculate about.

Perception, Memory, and Political Anxiety

Loïc connects the intensifying phenomena to his psychoanalysis. As the analysis draws forgotten episodes from the past, he begins to recover childhood experiences of extrasensory perception; the capacities he had repressed seem to return with renewed force. He considers whether the old building’s noises are signs of dimensions beyond ordinary reality, but the narrative leaves their status uncertain. The encounters may be supernatural, psychological, or both in Loïc’s understanding. What is clear is that he experiences them as something more persistent than a passing fright.

That uncertainty is reinforced by the political moment. Loïc thinks of his Ottawa years as a convergence of consequential events and a turning point in Canadian and Quebec history. Five years earlier, in his final year at university, he had protested with fellow students against Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s invocation of emergency powers during the October Crisis: soldiers had been sent into Montreal and hundreds of intellectuals and writers imprisoned in response to the abductions of a diplomat and a minister by a small group of aspiring terrorists. Yet Loïc later accepts Régis’s offer to work in the prime minister’s cabinet, not without painful hesitation. The haunted building is therefore the setting for a contradiction already present in his life: he has entered the political centre whose actions once provoked his outrage.

The atmosphere of uncertainty reaches beyond the corridors. On the night Loïc sees the shadows from the street, Pierre Elliott Trudeau has appeared sombre and battle-worn amid the turmoil in Ottawa. A slip before journalists briefly makes him say that he will continue to preach separatism in Quebec before he hastily corrects himself. The moment is treated as a revealing lapse, a possible flash of an earlier self who had once imagined an independent Quebec republic. Against this unsettled political backdrop, the old building’s shifting forms make the past feel neither safely concluded nor wholly separate from the present.

Foreshadowing and Narrative Significance

In retrospect, Loïc understands the voices he took for echoes from beyond the grave as possible advance signs of the political and personal rupture he would experience with Régis. The haunting accompanies the discovery of who his celebrated cousin really is, beyond the family’s admiring image of him. Their political differences will bring repeated dramatic confrontations, but shared work and a bond extending beyond politics will also create a profound friendship. The apparitions do not simply predict conflict: they occupy the same uneasy space as the intimacy that grows between the two men.

The building’s spectral quality gives that history a form. Empty offices seem full; old architecture becomes a medium through which incompatible languages, political grievances, private grief, and unrealized futures press into the present. Loïc’s image of waves or a radio transmitting the strongest vibrations of the past makes the haunting less a single encounter with a ghost than an ongoing disturbance in the boundary between public history and personal memory. When Loïc later sees movement in his former office’s windows, the episode gathers the year’s recurring impressions into one final image: even after the cabinet has moved, the building—and the history he associates with it—continues to follow him.