Lake America? The name game has rules, just not for everyone
If names and history are as important and sacred as our political leaders now insist, why has that same political class spent nearly a decade erasing and revising them?
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has unveiled a two-storey billboard on the Lake Ontario shoreline reading "Lake Ontario. Now and Always." It's a direct response to U.S. President Donald Trump who signed an executive order renaming the lake "Lake America."
BREAKING: President Trump officially changes the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 27, 2026
"If you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean." 👀 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/OZOmfibisP
Ford told cameras that long after this president is gone, the world will still call it Lake Ontario — which is fair enough. Names and history are important. But where has that conviction been for the last… decade?
For years, Canadians were told that old names were sources of harm — that keeping them was a form of violence. Under Ford's own tenure, Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister and father of Confederation, sat boxed in plywood on the lawn of Queen's Park for five years after protesters doused his statue in pink paint in 2020.
It’s Lake Ontario, now and always. pic.twitter.com/KNahtPAMeJ
— Doug Ford (@fordnation) August 29, 2026
The boards didn't come down until June 2025. Half a decade of the man who built this country hidden away while committees debated whether he was fit to be seen.
Meanwhile in Toronto, city hall spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars scrubbing Henry Dundas's name from Yonge-Dundas Square, rebranding it Sankofa Square in August 2025. All of this over a contested interpretation of his record on slavery, despite Dundas himself being an abolitionist.
Tellingly, the street itself was left untouched when renaming was deemed to be too expensive. Instead, the square became a cheaper exercise in identity-politics theatrics.
Just up the road, Ryerson University became Toronto Metropolitan. Parks, plazas, and statues have repeatedly followed the same script: rename first, explain later, and hope that the public never asks questions.
Now suddenly the same political class is clutching its pearls because Trump is trolling a shared body of water.
Prime Minister Mark Carney weighed in, noting the Wendat origins of "Ontari'io," dating back over 400 years, and declaring that "naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always."
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.
— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) August 27, 2026
The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.…
It’s a neat, but awkward, sentiment. Especially given that Carney has a daughter who was born Sophia and now goes by Sasha, using they/them pronouns, and who has written about her experience at the now-shuttered Tavistock gender clinic — closed after the Cass Review exposed serious failures in its care of minors.
This is the double standard on full display: deadnaming is violence, old names are harmful, use the new name or be branded a bigot — unless, apparently, the name in question is a Great Lake.
So when the U.S. State Department posted that it had "corrected this mistake" and apologized for previously "deadnaming the lake," it was pure satire.
See, one cannot spend a decade insisting names are identity and identity is interchangeable, then act stunned when someone else picks up the same logic and turns it into a punchline.
In the end, it’s all theatre. Ford’s sign, Trump's order, Carney's history lesson; and it’s paid for by taxpayers throughout.
If names are sacred, they're sacred for everyone — Sir John A., Henry Dundas, and Lake Ontario alike. You don't get to pick which history is allowed to keep its name.
