Notes

Lake Ontario is still Lake Ontario. Your technology should answer to you.

Colin Duggan, Antigonish. Published 31 August 2026.

A handful of Canadian websites spent a weekend calling Lake Ontario something else. Nobody who runs those websites decided that.

On the last weekend of August 2026, several ordinary Canadian websites were displaying something odd. Hydro One's outage map. The LCBO's store locator. Metrolinx's station finder. Infrastructure Ontario's property list. The store locator for Loblaws. All of them showed the water on the Ontario shore labelled Lake America.

Here is how that happened. In late August, following an executive order, the United States renamed the lake in its own federal geographic names database. On 29 August, Google said it would apply the change in Google Maps for users in the United States, in line with its long-standing practice of following official government sources for place names. Google also said people using Maps in Canada would continue to see Lake Ontario.

That second part was true, and it is exactly why this is worth your attention. Canadians opening Google Maps did see Lake Ontario. The Canadian websites did not, because those websites do not draw their own maps. They serve their maps through Google's mapping platform. What those pages rendered was answering to a different set of defaults than the person looking at it, and nobody noticed until it showed up on screen.

Ontario's minister responsible said the province was reviewing its websites to make sure they identify Lake Ontario by its correct name. Hydro One said the problem came from a third-party mapping service and that it was working with its vendor to correct it. Both are the right response. Both are also the sentence you end up saying when a decision you did not make turns up inside something with your name on it.

This is what dependency looks like when it becomes visible

The label on a lake is a small thing. The mechanism underneath it is not. A foreign platform applied a political decision, and that decision appeared inside Canadian institutions' own digital property, without their involvement and at first without their knowledge.

Most of the time this is invisible, because most of the time nothing changes. You put your photographs somewhere. Your customer list lives somewhere. Your contact form goes through somewhere. Your bookings, your invoices, your calendar, the map on your services page. Each of those was a decision somebody made once, often years ago, often without much thought, and it holds right up until the day the terms change, or the price changes, or a government somewhere makes a decision about a lake.

If it can happen to Hydro One, it can happen to a plumber's website, a farm's order form, or a family's twelve years of photographs. The difference is that Hydro One has people whose job it is to notice.

Sovereignty is not only for governments

The Government of Canada describes digital sovereignty as staying in control of its own data, technology, and essential online services rather than depending on foreign companies, foreign systems, and foreign laws. That is a good, plain definition. The trouble is that nearly everyone talking about it is talking to governments, universities, banks, and large regulated companies.

Meanwhile someone running a two-person business in Antigonish carries much the same exposure and has none of the support. No procurement department, no legal review, no IT team. Just an account, a password, and a reasonable assumption that things will keep working the way they did last year.

Where to actually start

You do not have to leave anything. You do need to know what leaving would involve. Seven questions will get most people most of the way:

  1. What important services do I depend on?
  2. Who owns each provider, and which country's laws apply?
  3. Can I export my information in a format that is actually useful?
  4. Who owns my domain, website, store, and customer list?
  5. What stops working if the provider changes its rules, its price, or its product?
  6. Is there a Canadian, open-source, or otherwise more accountable alternative?
  7. Which single change would reduce the most risk without disrupting my life or my business?

Question seven is the one that matters. Most people who start this end up making one change, not twenty, and the one change is usually smaller than they feared.

Sovereignty is not purity

Here is the part this conversation usually gets wrong. The goal is not to strip every American product out of your life. That is neither practical nor sensible, and anyone promising you a clean break is selling something.

Keeping a service because it is genuinely the best tool for the job is a perfectly good decision. Keeping it because you never looked, and could not leave if you wanted to, is a different thing wearing the same clothes. The distance between those two is the entire point. Informed choice, not purity.

If you want a hand with it

The seven questions above are free and they are the honest core of this. Work through them yourself and you will already be ahead of where most small businesses are.

If you would rather talk it through, I offer a $75 conversation for one specific question, and a $225 checkup if you want a broader written plan. Both are a fixed price, paid once, and neither one includes doing the migration for you. If the honest answer is that you do not need to pay me anything, that is the answer you will get.

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