Source: The Conversation – Canada
Local leaders in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa have initiated a process to rename Trump Avenue in response to United States President Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
It’s not the first time Ottawa has considered renaming the street.
Shortly after Trump’s first presidential term ended on Jan. 20, 2021, Ottawa City Coun. Riley Brockington polled Trump Avenue residents to gauge their support for renaming the street.
The poll was evenly split with 21 residents in favour and 21 opposed to the renaming proposal, along with another 20 residents who did not respond. At the time, the city’s naming policy required that more than 50 per cent of a street’s residents must support a street renaming application, so the proposal to rename Trump Avenue did not proceed further.
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Trump’s Lake Ontario bluster: Why treating his sovereignty threats as a joke is dangerous
The Trump name on the Canadian map
The issue of renaming Trump Avenue resurfaced again after Trump declared Lake Ontario would appear as “Lake America” on U.S. federal maps.
Trump’s use of place renaming to retaliate against Canada for withdrawing from trade negotiations led many Canadians to defend the name of Lake Ontario as a matter of national pride.
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Trump’s ‘renaming’ of Lake Ontario is emblematic of centuries of colonial erasure
It’s also drawn attention to a number of geographic features in Canada that bear the Trump name. Canadian commentators have raised questions about whether places in Canada should continue to share a name with one of the most anti-Canadian presidents in American history.
According to the Canadian Geographical Names Database, there are eight geographic places that currently hold official status in Canada named “Trump.”
Examples include Trump Lake and Trump Creek in Ontario and the Trump Islands in Newfoundland and Labrador. Québec also previously had a Lac Trump (now Lac du Porc-Épic, or Porcupine Lake), and there was once a Trump post office in Manitoba. However, none of these places were named for the current U.S. president.
The larger geopolitical puzzle
The only place in Canada officially named to honour the president is Trump Avenue in Ottawa. It acquired its name more than two decades ago when Trump was best known as a New York real estate developer and Ottawa’s Central Park neighbourhood was being developed with a New York City theme.
The presence of Trump’s name in Canada’s capital city holds a different significance today due to his antagonistic policies toward Canada as president.
Renaming Trump Avenue is one piece of a larger geopolitical puzzle, since it is part of the broader effort by Ottawa’s leaders to resist U.S. threats to Canadian sovereignty and economic prosperity.
Place naming as “toponymic diplomacy”
There is a long history of cities using place renaming as a form of geopolitical communication to foreign governments. Turkish political scientist Doğuş Düzgün refers to this process as “toponymic diplomacy.”
This geopolitical use of place naming can take the form of “toponymic solidarity” to signal support for another country or “symbolic retortion,” when place names are “used as tools for sending retaliatory symbolic messages to another country,” according to researchers in the field of critical place-naming studies.
For instance, the city of Glasgow renamed a public square next to the South African Consulate-General’s office as “Nelson Mandela Place” in 1986 to express its opposition to apartheid.
More recently, a number of cities have renamed streets, squares and other public places adjacent to Russian embassies or consulates in support of Ukraine.
As Ottawa considers street renaming as diplomatic retaliation against Trump’s policies, other governments are moving in the opposite direction by naming public places in Trump’s honour, from the 655-mile President Donald J Trump Highway in Morocco to Donald Trump Avenue in Hyderabad, India.
More than simply showing support for the U.S., these renamings operate as a form of paying tribute and signalling loyalty to a leader seemingly obsessed with seeing places and institutions named after him.
In appealing to Trump’s “toponymic narcissism,” place naming is reduced to a transaction — a way for a country and its leaders to potentially gain favour in wider diplomatic and economic negotiations.
Principles and pitfalls
Trump Avenue in Ottawa exposes the pitfalls of naming places after living people, whose future actions may bring them into disrepute. For this reason, the Ontario Geographic Names Board, while having no authority over naming in municipalities such as Ottawa, doesn’t support commemorative naming until a person has been deceased for at least five years.
And now that some Ottawa leaders and citizens want to launch a diplomatic retort by removing Trump’s name from their community, making that change may not be as easy as it sounds.
Trump carried out the renaming of Lake Ontario by a unilateral executive order, but that runs counter to widely accepted principles of commemorative place renaming. Those principles suggest that when the renaming of geographic features is pursued, it should result from a deliberative process of public consultation.
Ottawa’s current commemorative naming policy includes criteria that would likely disqualify Trump place names if proposed today. Among other requirements, commemorated people are expected to have brought “honour to Ottawa, Ontario or Canada.”
Yet the same policy also makes the removal of the existing Trump street name procedurally difficult. Since the unsuccessful 2021 effort to rename Trump Avenue, Ottawa revised its policy to require over 75 per cent of the residents and property owners on an affected street to approve any renaming application.
Experiences in other North American cities suggest that obtaining that kind of super-majority in support can become a significant obstacle to street renaming.
Place names in the post-Trump era
In a post-Trump future, it’s possible some communities will remove commemorative place names honouring Trump.
One harbinger of a looming potential de-commemoration occurred in 2023 when Donald Trump Square was renamed United States Square in the Israeli city of Petach Tikvah (meaning “Gateway of Hope”) following the end of Trump’s first term in the White House.
The removal of Trump place names in the U.S. and around the world is a real possibility once his second term ends. But doing so will likely require a deliberate bureaucratic and political struggle rather than simply flipping a switch.
Reuben Rose-Redwood has previously received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
CindyAnn Rose-Redwood has previously received funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Derek H. Alderman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/place-name-politics-why-renaming-ottawas-trump-avenue-requires-more-than-just-outrage/