It’s time to rename the Strait of Juan de Fuca ‘the Canadian Channel’

With a few exceptions, most Canadians seem to agree that while a tariff war with the United States is far from ideal, the only sensible way to respond to bad-faith bargaining by the Trump Administration in the United States is with dollar-for-dollar reciprocal tariffs, targeted to hit Americans where they’ll feel it. 

The rare exceptions mainly seem to include treason-adjacent Alberta separatists, including some who hold seats in Parliament and the Legislature, and Conservatives elected to provincial and federal office in Wild Rose Country who may not be MAGA-influenced Fifty-first Staters but lack the intestinal fortitude to speak up on behalf of their country. 

Plus, of course, there’s that one weirdo MP from Ontario who was apparently U.S. Vice-President JD Vance’s BFF in college. 

Other than those guys – and I say this as a lifelong New Democrat – no one speaks for Canadians at this fraught moment better than Ontario’s Conservative Premier, Doug Ford, who said of President Donald Trump, “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so he has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”

Mr. Trump, no stranger to having his own sizeable posterior kissed, responded by suggesting he would rename Lake Ontario, taking to his personal Pravda social media site to declare: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Thanks to the simpering toadies at Google, Mr. Trump has enjoyed some success with his effort last year to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Golfo de América, or words to that effect. One supposes, therefore, that this is an actual possibility. 

This raises an interesting question for Canadians: How do we respond, appropriately and proportionally, with a symbolic gesture that will get up President Trump’s sensitive nose without directly insulting the United States?

I have a solution. It’s time to rename the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington State The Canadian Channel. 

Full disclosure here, I grew up in a house where you could see the Juan de Fuca Strait from one window, that of a tiny bathroom on the second floor. 

The appropriate person to consult about the naming of geographical features and outdoor signage is always a 13-year-old boy. Since I was about 13, I have been vividly aware that Juan de Fuca is not an appropriate name for a large body of salt water, or for that matter anything, anywhere in the English-speaking world. 

For just one thing, almost nobody in these parts knows how to pronounce Juan, after the probably undeserving Greek navigator, Juan de Fuca (né Ioannis Fokas, which is even worse) who probably never even saw the passage, let alone sailed up it. 

Anyway, while a strait is generally thought of in maritime circles as being skinnier than a channel, both terms are vague about just how narrow the passage in question must be. So we sovereign Canadians can just name the Strait of Juan de Fuca the Canadian Channel if we bloody well want to. And if Mr. Trump proceeds with Lake America, we should.

As Mr. Trump did south of the longest previously undefended border in the world, we can order all Canadian departments and agencies to call it the Canadian Channel all the way from the open Pacific to the Salish Sea. What’s more, we can ask our European and Antipodean allies to do the same thing. And you can count on it, Dear Readers, that at this point they will do so with alacrity, even delight!

If Mr. Trump confuses this as for something to do with Canadian content rules for broadcasters, well, so much the better. 

When the dispute with the United States simmers down and, as the Scots put it, we’ve sent Mr. Trump homeward tae think again – with any luck, immediately after the U.S. mid-term elections in November – the name of the Canadian Channel should remain. 

It can be a reminder of our historical ties to the brave mariners who in the summer of 1588 rallied to their queen and drove away vastly larger ships of the Spanish Armada in the aptly named English Channel – the venerable and dignified name recognized to this day not only by the Spanish and the French, but even by the Russians! 

It will also be a lesson to future American presidents that, sooner or later, those who come to Canada to Fuca ’round, find out. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter!