Canada Has a Trump Lake. Should We Rename It?

On August 25, Donald Trump posted that the United States is giving “serious consideration” to renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America, on the grounds that America does not expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer. He followed it with an altered map, the words Lake Ontario struck out and Lake America added in gold.

Ontario, as it happens, has a Trump Lake. What if we just renamed it?

What Trump can and cannot actually do

A US president can change what the American federal government calls something. That is what happened with the Gulf of Mexico, which the US government now calls the Gulf of America while Mexico, Canada, most international bodies and a fair number of American news organisations carry on as before.

Lake Ontario is a shared, transboundary body of water. Washington can relabel its own maps. It cannot tell Canada, the International Joint Commission or anybody else what to print. The practical effect of renaming Lake Ontario is that American federal documents would disagree with every other map on earth, including the ones sold in Rochester.

Where Trump Lake actually is

Trump Lake sits at 48.30 degrees north, 83.65 degrees west, in the unorganized part of Sudbury District. That is roughly 55 kilometres north of Chapleau and around 280 kilometres northwest of the city of Greater Sudbury in a straight line, which is to say it is a long way from anywhere.

The name was made official on October 7, 1954, when Donald Trump was eight years old and living in Queens. Whoever this lake commemorates, it is not him. Northern Ontario is full of small lakes carrying the surnames of surveyors, prospectors, timber cruisers and settlers, and this reads like one of those.

There is also a Trump Creek nearby, at 48.32 north, 83.68 west, draining the same corner of the district.

It is not even the only one

Search the federal names database for Trump and ten records come back, covering nine distinct places in four provinces.

Canada has, quietly and by pure coincidence, been sitting on a Trump archipelago in Newfoundland this entire time.

The case for renaming it

1. He would find out. There is no version of this where he does not find out. Whatever else you think of the idea, that is not in doubt.
2. It is proportionate. One lake for one lake. Nobody could accuse Ontario of escalating, which is more than can be said for most of what has happened between the two governments since the spring.
3. It is legally clean. Lake Ontario is transboundary and messy. Trump Lake is entirely inside Ontario, and Ontario has undisputed authority over names within its own borders. No treaty, no commission, no argument.
4. Almost nobody has to update anything. One NTS map sheet, a few fishing guides and a topographic layer. Compare that to the cost of relabelling a Great Lake that borders eight million people.
5. There is a better name available. Ontario has a real, funded process for restoring Indigenous place names, and northern Ontario has a long list of features carrying a settler surname over an older Anishinaabe name. A rename that produced something meaningful would outlast the news cycle by about a century.
6. It would make him big mad. You just know it would.

Who would actually decide

Naming in Canada is coordinated nationally by the Geographical Names Board of Canada, which has set standards since 1897, but the decisions belong to the provinces and territories for features inside their own boundaries. In Ontario that is the Ontario Geographic Names Board, a seven-member body that includes representatives of Ontario First Nations and of the province's English and French communities.

The board's naming principles contain the detail that makes the whole American exercise funnier. The board does not support commemorative naming of a living person, and a commemorative proposal is only considered once the person has been dead at least five years.

Should Canada start being as silly as Donald Trump?