Colby Cosh: Will Ottawa rename Trump Avenue as revenge for ‘Lake America’?

The 'Trump Avenue' street sign is seen in a west side suburb in Ottawa on Jan. 26, 2021. Photo by MICHEL COMTE/AFP via Getty Images

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I couldn’t help ruminating on yesterday’s news of a renewed push to find a more suitable name for Trump Avenue in Ottawa’s Central Park neighbourhood. We live in an era of woke iconoclasm — some would say in the dying days of one — but this is obviously a different sort of matter. Trump Avenue started making national headlines in 2021, when city council polled residents about the offending nomenclature but failed to secure a majority in favour of a change that would involve some inconvenience and expense. Trump had just been ejected from the White House, a process accompanied by a smattering of violent resistance; perhaps the good people of Trump Avenue hoped he would retreat safely into the crumbling pages of history and spare them the trouble of revision. Didn’t we all.

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In 2026, as in 2021, reporters covering the Trump Avenue controversy have been a tad elliptical about how Trump Avenue came by its name. One might be forgiven for thinking that the personal connection to Donald J. Trump was incidental; a photo caption on Wikipedia at the time of writing has the effrontery to describe the street as “indirectly named” for Trump. The truth is that the developers who turned an experimental farm into the Central Park subdivision in the 1990s named a street very directly after renowned real-estate developer Donald J. Trump for explicitly articulated marketing reasons.

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All the streets in Central Park contain themed references to the posh parts of New York, but there is no original “Trump Avenue” in NYC. His name is just plastered all over the place — and in the ’90s that name still denoted glitz, wealth and commercial vision rather than destructive lunacy. People were expected to want to buy property on Trump Avenue, and did buy it.

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Those whose brains aren’t wriggling with ideological nematodes naturally prefer that the names of the byways they use and the places they inhabit be as permanent as possible, which is why so many of us fume over acts of re-naming contrived to serve as humiliation rituals or gestures of obeisance. This is, as it turns out, an excellent reason not to name or re-name things after living people, or in pursuit of other ephemeral trends. Even leaving all such considerations aside, it was stupid in the first place for Ottawa to tolerate the creation of a “Central Park” full of names imitating another capital’s landmarks. Developers cannot seem to resist this sort of crap, which is how Calgary and Edmonton recently sprouted twin outer-suburban neighbourhoods that are both called “The Hamptons.” (Note: they do not resemble the Hamptons.)

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What makes this case exceptional is that celebrity developer Trump turned President Trump has not only abused power in a multitude of ways and threatened the integrity of the Canadian state; he has just now followed through on his threats and ordered the U.S. federal government to rename Lake Ontario (as it renamed the Gulf of Mexico) in pursuit of his vendetta against Canada. It might be one thing, an understandable but obnoxious thing, to impulsively rename Berlin, Ontario, because you are at war with a state that claims to represent all Germans. But Trump is now the world’s most notorious practitioner of crazed onomastic revision itself!

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And, as we all know, his amour-propre has the size and flammable nature of a zeppelin: he will actually feel indignant and aggrieved if he gets wind that the impulsively named Trump Avenue has suddenly been re-branded. One is tempted to suggest “Mamdani Boulevard” or “Ocasio-Cortez Way,” but let’s try for our own sake to achieve nirvana and exit the St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad-St. Petersburg cycle of political renamings.

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National Post

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