Cantley

Cantley is a municipality in Quebec (Canada) located in the Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais Regional County Municipality (MRC), in the Outaouais administrative region. It is a suburb of the cities of Gatineau and Ottawa, within the National Capital Region of Canada. The seat of the Municipality of Cantley is located at 8 River Road, in Cantley. The population in the 2021 Canadian census was 11,449, an increase of 7.0% over the 2016 population of 10,699. French is the mother tongue of 86.7% of Cantley residents.

The municipality is located 13 km from downtown Ottawa and is bounded by the city of Gatineau to the southeast, the Gatineau River to the west and the municipality of Val-des-Monts to the northeast.

The origin of the name is still debated. Some say that it was given in memory of a parish in Norfolk County, England. This theory is based on the idea that the first wave of settlers arrived from this parish.

The second theory is that this municipality was named in honor of Colonel Cantley, a British army officer who worked on the construction of the Rideau Canal. According to this theory, Colonel John By, who was supervising the construction of the Rideau Canal in the 1820s, distributed land that belonged to the Crown to a few people following the construction of the canal. He distributed one of them to a certain Colonel Cantley, one of his highest ranking officers. This land was located within the current limits of Cantley. Colonel Cantley therefore settled there in the early 1830s and the municipality was named in his honor.