Ottawa SuperEX
Defunct annual exhibition in Ottawa, Canada
Ottawa SuperEX (officially the Central Canada Exhibition) was an eleven-day annual exhibition that took place every August at Lansdowne Park in Ottawa, Ontario. The exhibition provided exhibits, entertainment and amusements indoors in the buildings on site and outdoors on the grounds. The Central Canada Exhibition Association operated a fair annually from 1888 until 2010, except during World War II. The fair was on hiatus due to plans to redevelop Lansdowne Park and the Association continued to work towards finding opportunities to bring back SuperEX. It was announced in December 2015 that the Ottawa SuperEX board had disbanded a year earlier and the Ex would not be returning.
History
Single exhibitions were held on the site in 1875, 1879, 1883 and 1888. The last of these exhibitions was opened on September 20, 1888 by Charles Magee, President of the Exhibition Association, with Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald and Governor General Lord Stanley in attendance.
A decision was made to formalize an ongoing annual fair, resulting in the 1888 special event becoming the first of the annual fairs. The 1888 Exhibition Association evolved into a permanent organization, and a lease of the site was agreed to with the City of Ottawa.
Only a few buildings existed at the site at the time, including the first Grandstand, overlooking a dirt track and horse display area. This dirt track and horse display area has evolved into today's Frank Clair Stadium. The primary focus was on agricultural displays, but exhibits included manufacturer's exhibits from the beginning.
“Ottawa SuperEX” enters the record as defunct annual exhibition in Ottawa, Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ottawa, SuperEX and Defunct can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7109253. Authority coordinates are 45.400, -75.683. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1888, 2010, 2015 and 1875.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ottawa SuperEX” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.