Chris Selley: We could have just ignored Trump’s ‘Lake America’ trolling

Doug Ford's government spent $25,000 on a giant sign along the lakeshore, in Winona, near Hamilton. Winona just so happens to be in Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, a swing riding that’s holding a provincial byelection on Thursday. Photo by Peter J. Thompson /National Post

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Several Canadian commentatorshave noteda certain irony in the mass outrage over U.S. President Donald Trump’s supposed “renaming” of Lake Ontario. Where was that outrage, they ask, when vandals decapitated statues of various Canadian historical figures and successfully demanded the historic names of schools, buildings and other things be changed?

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They’re just not the same kind of problem. And in a way, the comparison almost seems to diminish our own issues with historical erasure. How we’ve treated our collective history is far worse, infinitely more serious, than Trump pretending to have created “Lake America.” At most, his executive order binds U.S. federal government agencies and officials to refer to it as “Lake America,” not state agencies or officials, and certainly not Canadian ones.

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Meanwhile Ryerson University is still Toronto Metropolitan University, and Yonge-Dundas Square is “Sankofa Square” for absolutely no good reason at all. And that’s just within a few blocks of downtown Toronto.

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I realize it’s not in our nature to ignore the U.S., nor is it usually in our self-interest to do so. For one thing, that leads to headlines like “(Insert Canadian politician) refuses to condemn Trump.” Still, we should at least consider the motives for political outrage and question whether silence might have served us better. Trump can only be thrilled by this morning’s press clippings.

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Had “Lake America” simply produced universal condemnation and mockery, that might have been different. But it also turned Canadians against each other, and even against their own self-interest. “On Sunday … social media users noticed that maps on sites including Hydro One, Ontario’s Metrolinx, Elections Canada, Loblaw and Infrastructure Ontario all showed ‘Lake America’ when zoomed out,” Global News reported. Same with Ontario’s provincially run LCBO liquor stores, CBC noted.

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Stephen Crawford, Ontario’s public and business service delivery minister, sprang into action, assuring the public he had ordered the offending maps fixed. And suddenly the online station-locator map function for the province’s GO Transit line was (temporarily) gone. Was that a win for Ontarians?

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To my eye, we basically handed a sad, sleepy troll (the equivalent of “a rock band … in a casino playing some song from 50 years ago,” in Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s apt description) the most total victory he could reasonably hope for from such a stupid, unoriginal stunt. We danced like marionettes for a man who recently posted a video of Canada geese marching in formation under American flags. The geese have Trump’s haircut, human forearms (definitely not Trump’s) and rifles, which they proceed to shoot in the air in front of an AI-hallucinated city somewhere on Lake America.

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But these fights clearly work for politicians — or at least, they think they do. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government spent $25,000 on a giant sign along the lakeshore, in Winona, near Hamilton, declaring the ostensibly self-evident truth that it’s called Lake Ontario. Winona just so happens to be in Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, a swing riding that’s holding a provincial byelection on Thursday.