Media releases

• Renaming of Lake Ontario signals widening fracture in U.S.-Canada relations: Brock experts

  Wednesday, September 02, 2026 | By Brock University

  EXPERT ADVISORY – Sept. 2, 2026 — R0075

  U.S. President Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario is the latest manoeuvre in his ongoing campaign to undermine Canada’s sovereignty, say experts from Brock University’s Department of Political Science.

  In the days following the breakdown of U.S.-Canada trade negotiations, Trump signed an executive order to change the lake’s more-than-400-year-old name to Lake America, despite its longstanding Indigenous roots.

  Professor Blayne Haggart says Trump’s latest escalation emphasizes why Prime Minister Mark Carney was right to walk away from the negotiating table.

  “On the face of it, the whole renaming is ridiculous, but it’s what it reflects that’s important: that Donald Trump is not interested in a good trade deal for the United States or Canada. He’s interested in dominating Canada,” Haggart says. “Canadians and Canadian leaders have to come to terms with the fact that this means an agreement we can trust, a binding agreement with the United States, is a literal impossibility for the foreseeable future.”

  The ability for countries to sign agreements with each other is based on trust and their faith that each country involved in the negotiation will keep their word. Trump’s actions, Haggart says, have shown Canada, and other countries around the world, that U.S. leadership can’t currently be trusted.

  “We can’t sign any agreement with them, because it won’t be worth the paper it’s written on,” he says. “And any terms we agree to will, in essence, be terms of surrender or terms of subjugation, because that’s what the United States is interested in.”

  Companies like Google and Apple deciding to implement the name change, even though they’re not legally required to, reflects the ongoing symbiotic relationship between U.S. tech companies and the U.S. government, Haggart says.

  “It should raise questions in Canada about the wisdom of continuing to depend on U.S. digital technologies, in government, business and the post-secondary education sector,” he adds. “There is no reason to think that this dependence couldn’t be weaponized again against Canada, by U.S. companies afraid of making Trump angry.”

  Rather than sway public opinion in the U.S.’s favour, Associate Professor Paul Hamilton says the executive order will have the opposite effect.

  “It will galvanize already strong support for the Canadian government’s position among the public,” he says. “It might also cause serious division between border state Republicans and the rest of the party.”

  Hamilton says while some private and public corporations in Canada have seen their digital maps default to the name change since the executive order, many have pointed out it was not intentional and will be corrected. In the U.S., references to Lake Ontario will be changed at the federal level, but Hamilton says individual states are not obliged to follow the executive order, adding the order has no authority outside of the U.S. and can be reversed by any future President.

  “This bizarre action serves only to diminish the President’s stature and is strange considering the huge issues facing the U.S. today, such as the economy, Iran and the upcoming elections,” he says.

  Associate Professor Stefan Dolgert sees the renaming as another attempt by Trump to assert dominance over Canada through actions meant to belittle and demean the country.

  “He wants to smash his imprint on the world,” says Dolgert, likening this behaviour to the kind of fascist politics Trump has been accused of admiring from leaders like Hitler and Mussolini. “It’s all in service of the cult of personality.”

  Canada has allowed itself to become dependent on the U.S., Dolgert says, recognizing that Carney’s work to pursue trade arrangements with other countries is aimed at reducing that dependence.

  “America was a gigantic market that we could sell our goods to, and we made a lot of money from that, but this dependency has become a sword that’s hanging over our head,” he says.

  While this is a “fundamental thing that has to change,” it’s equally important for Canada to push back against Trump and stand up to his bullying tactics, he adds.

  “Both Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have been similarly aligned in that strategy. You don’t want to show weakness.”

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  *Melinda Cheevers, Communications Specialist, Brock University, [email protected] or 289-241-5855

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  Categories: Media releases

• What ancient history can teach us about the risks of renaming waterways

  Tuesday, September 01, 2026 | By Brock University

  EXPERT ADVISORY – Sept. 1, 2026 — R0074

  As people on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border continue to navigate choppy waters following a Presidential executive order renaming Lake Ontario, a Brock University expert says there are valuable lessons to be learned by revisiting the past.

  “The fascinating thing about studying the ancient world is that almost everything we experience today has parallels with what happened before,” says Katharine T. von Stackelberg, Associate Professor of Classics and Archaeology.

  There is a trope in ancient history that tells the tale — and spells the outcome — of rulers laying claim to large bodies of water, she says.

  Renaming attempts by ancient Greek and Roman leaders didn’t end well.

  “Renaming a place is a form of control. But in the ancient world, it was understood that nature — seen as being divine — could be co-opted, but never fully controlled. When historians give accounts of such attempts, it’s always meant to be read as a warning,” she says.

  Imposing a new name on a territory or geographical feature in the Greco-Roman world was not common, von Stackelberg explains. Instead, the topological naming practices of the Greek and Romans were consistently cognizant of local peoples and tribes.

  “Essentially, as the Romans expanded their territories and encountered rivers or mountains, they would use the name of the tribe or community that was nearest, or most dominant, as a toponym,” she says.

  Von Stackelberg notes that the most famous recorded example of a ruler asserting dominion and ownership over a body of water happened in 480 BCE, when Persian king Xerxes the Great crossed a narrow body of water known as the Hellespont (now known as the Dardanelles Straight).

  “Xerxes, who had a gigantic army, needed to cross the Hellespont to subjugate the Greeks,” she says, “and he instructed his army engineers to construct a pontoon bridge to create a walkway between anchored boats.”

  He then marched his army across while delivering rousing speeches, ordering his soldiers to whip the water as they made their way.

  “It was an act of dominance, a public relations gesture of sorts,” von Stackelberg says. “They symbolically dropped shackles into the water to demonstrate Xerxes’s ‘control’ of the waters.”

  Despite this impressive display, the Persian army never gained control of the Greek city states, with the event signalling a foundational moment for Greek history.

  About 500 years later, von Stackelberg says the Roman Emperor Caligula enacted the same scene with similar consequences.

  “In 39 CE, Caligula created a pontoon bridge on the Bay of Naples in a similar show of power. He marched at the head of his troops wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great, playing the role of conqueror and showing his domination of the waters,” she says.

  Caligula then attempted to invade the British Isles, but he never actually crossed the English Channel.

  “He stopped at the shoreline and staged a show, ordering his soldiers to collect seashells as spoils of their campaign to bring back to Rome,” she says.

  Caligula’s reign ended a year later.

  Both stories, according to von Stackelberg, are recorded in historical texts as examples of unfitness to rule and megalomania.

  “These instances of attempting to dominate waters entered ancient cultural consciousness as examples of ‘hubris’ — an excessive arrogance that invites one’s own downfall,” she says.

  Von Stackelberg says these tales became moral lessons passed down through the ages as warnings against overstretching one’s limits. As centuries passed, “hubris” came to more generally describe sowing the seeds of one’s own destruction.

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  *Melinda Cheevers, Communications Specialist, Brock University, [email protected] or 289-241-5855

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  Categories: Media releases