Lake America Appears On Google Maps, Ontario Cottagers Report The Water Tastes The Same
For roughly eleven hours on Sunday, several Canadian websites pulling live map data displayed a body of water labelled **Lake America**, sitting exactly where Lake Ontario had been sitting since the last glacier left.
The reaction was swift and extremely Canadian. Nobody blocked a bridge. Instead, four separate municipal tourism boards quietly updated their PDF brochures, then quietly un-updated them, then filed a complaint with a web form that returns an automated reply in nine languages.
"We take naming disputes seriously," said a Natural Resources Canada spokesperson, referring reporters to a 1958 boundary waters treaty and a phone number that rings at a desk in Burlington.
The practical effects were modest. A Scarborough kayak rental listed its location as "Lake America waterfront," which increased bookings by nine percent, mostly from people who wanted a photo. A Kingston brewery released a sour called Cartographic Error within thirty-one hours, which is the fastest any Canadian institution has ever responded to anything.
Meanwhile, in Alberta, a small-town independence organiser told CBC he found the whole thing clarifying. "They're renaming our lakes," he said, standing 2,800 kilometres from the lake in question, in a province with no lakes touching the United States.
By Monday morning the label had reverted. Google called it a data ingestion issue. The Ontario government called it a victory. The lake, which has spent 12,000 years being cold, choppy, and full of quagga mussels, could not be reached for comment, having taken no position on any human naming convention since the Precambrian.