Government of Canada Buildings (North York)

The Government of Canada Building, also known as the Joseph Sheppard Federal Building, is a Government of Canada office complex at 4900 Yonge Street in North York. Built in 1977 to service residents of the former Metropolitan Toronto boroughs of North York and Etobicoke, it houses a branch of the Passport Office in addition to other federal departments.

It is one of several federal building around Toronto:

  • Health Canada Building on Midland Avenue and Highway 401 in Scarborough
  • Government of Canada Building on Borough Drive in Scarborough
  • Dominion Public Building on Front Street West
  • Dominion Public Building at 338 Keele Street

The structure, with its multi-layered design, stands out among the surrounding skyscrapers along Yonge Street, which were built during the office boom of the 1990s surrounding the diversification of downtown North York.

Famous quotes containing the words government, canada and/or buildings:

    “In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.”
    —Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)

    “Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante’s scheme, Limbo is to Hell.”
    —Irving Layton (b. 1912)

    “The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)