Canada and US Exchange Actions Over Lake Ontario Naming Amid Trade Dispute
A Lake Cannot Be Renamed Into Legitimacy
When rulers treat shared waters and shared trade as toys for unilateral gestures, they step from government by consent toward arbitrary power, however loudly the music plays in the background.
I find it a curious spectacle to see a great lake turned into a stage-prop in a quarrel over steel. We are told that one government has, by administrative act, renamed Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” while its neighbour erects a great sign—“Lake Ontario. Now and Always”—in reply. Around this theatre of boards and video, there runs a far weightier matter: a fifty percent tariff laid on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa. Names on signs and numbers on customs papers may seem unlike shackles and chains; yet all are instruments whereby some men assert a right to dispose of others’ property without their consent.
When I wrote the Second Treatise, I defined political power, in paraphrase, as the right to make laws with penalties, only for the public good. Power is a trust. It is given by free and equal persons that their lives, liberties, and estates may be better secured than they would be in the state of nature. The first question, therefore, is never what a prince, president, or parliament wills, but what a people could reasonably be supposed to have consented to. Any claim to rule others, whether over their land, their trade, or even the names by which their common world is called, must bear this burden.
Consider first the lake. Here is a body of water touching two countries, long known by one name to both. One government, by its own internal procedure, now declares it “Lake America” and displays a leader’s delight in a video of the old sign kicked down and a new one raised, amidst a dance. This is more than a jest. To rename what is plainly shared, without consultation with those who likewise border it, is to practice dominion without argument, as if proximity on one shore were title to the whole. It trains the understanding to accept usurpation in play, that it may not resist it in earnest.
Secondly, consider the tariffs. A fifty percent burden on steel from the neighbouring country, and retaliatory tariffs in return, are acts whereby each side lays hands on the other’s trade. Men who have, by their labour, joined the products of their mines and forges to their persons, thereby making it their property, suddenly find the conditions of sale altered by distant decrees. If such restraints arise from a common rule agreed between them, they might be endured as part of a known standing law. But where each government moves unilaterally, chiefly to pinch the other, trade becomes the battlefield of two wills, and merchants the hostages.
I do not say that every tariff is tyranny, nor that every act beyond ordinary law is unlawful; in the same Treatise I allowed a prerogative power, by which the executive may sometimes act without, or even against, the letter of the rule, where necessity and the manifest public good require it, and where the people may afterwards judge and revoke that trust. Yet here, as far as the facts reach me, I see not a pressing necessity but an escalating contest, where symbolism over a name and severity in duties provoke one another upward. When measures hurt both peoples in order to humble the other government, the plea of public good wears thin.
The danger is not that a sign by a lake, or a duty at a port, is in itself the last oppression men can bear; it is that such acts accustom subjects to arbitrary power. When rulers can, at a stroke, alter the common language of geography, and with another stroke make some men’s honest industry half its former worth, without a process where both sides are heard and an impartial judge decides, they are daily made more the judges in their own case. A long train of abuses is often composed of many such small, theatrical steps, each defended as a trifle, until resistance is painted as greater disorder than the quiet of submission.
What then remains to those affected? Not immediate revolt over a name or a tariff; that would be to mistake every grievance for a warrant to dissolve governments. But they retain the right to insist that power be brought back within the bounds of consent: that common resources be governed by common agreement; that trade rules be settled by known, mutual compacts rather than sporadic blows; that emergency discretion be shown as truly for the public and plainly revocable. If, instead, these gestures ripen into a settled practice of unilateral dominion, men will remember that God has left them, even when positive laws fail them, the appeal to heaven.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.