Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor says ‘Lake Ontario’ lyric now an anti-Trump rallying cry

TORONTO — Greg Keelor had been mulling what to say about Donald Trump all night.

Blue Rodeo was about to play “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet” during their Saturday show at Toronto’s RBC Amphitheatre, and the Canadian band’s frontman knew their 1993 hit contained a newly loaded lyric: “Out in the middle of Lake Ontario.”

Keelor considered using the moment to tear into the U.S. president, who last week signed an executive order to rename the body of water “Lake America.”

“A part of me just wanted to go off on Trump and just call him a lot of bad names,” the singer-songwriter says in an interview Monday.

But he opted for a different approach.

“I knew that the song would do the work” he says. “I didn’t have to say much. Just getting to that line was going to blow the roof off the place.”

Turns out he was right.

When Blue Rodeo reached the song, Keelor asked the roughly 16,000 people in attendance to sing “Lake Ontario” with “full authority and ownership,” with the lake itself stretching out behind the waterfront venue.

They roared the line out.

A map of Lake Ontario appeared on the screens behind the band, a visual Keelor had specifically requested before the show.

The moment has since gone viral, drawing international attention as Trump pushes to put his own stamp on the Great Lake shared by Canada and the U.S.

For Keelor, the response was far more charged than he expected.

“We were all just a little shocked at the wave of emotion that came from the audience when they got to that line,” he says. “It has a different meaning now. I’m very happy for that.”

Keelor says Trump’s name change, which comes amid an escalating trade war between Canada and the U.S., is “insulting” and emblematic of what he sees as a broader pattern of behaviour from the president.

“He’s an ignorant man,” Keelor says. “He’s just a man-baby throwing his food off his tray when he doesn’t like it, pounding his fists on his feeding tray.”

He adds that Trump’s name change on one of the Great Lakes is “just another aspect of his idiocy” and “so un-Canadian.”

But he also sees something unifying in the controversy.

“We’re not pushovers. We dig in,” he says.

To Keelor, Lake Ontario has always meant something more than a name on a map.

He says he wrote the song after walking around Port Hope, Ont., where he felt a deep connection to the water and the surrounding landscape.

“It’s sort of a mystical experience of sharing the oneness of all things, in a way,” he says.

The lake, he notes, predates the countries and borders that now surround it by thousands of years.

“That’s a very powerful body of water,” Keelor says. “Most Canadians, it wasn’t really something in your brain, it was just Lake Ontario. But now it’s taken on a significance and it’s a bit of a line in the sand.”

Trump’s executive order has only added to that symbolism.

“The Indigenous people had a relationship with this lake thousands of years before any of us showed up,” Keelor says.

“It’s unbelievable that the American people would have put him in power. It’s a very depressing thing.”

Keelor says Blue Rodeo has largely stopped touring the U.S.

“Nobody has any appetite to go down there and play,” he says.

Google Maps now displays “Lake America” for users in the U.S., while Canadians continue to see Lake Ontario. International users see both names.

“That corporate complicity is a scary thing,” says Keelor.

“Maps are something we take for granted most of the time, but they’re important. Arbitrary lines that are cut across countries, they mean a lot.”

Blue Rodeo doesn’t hit the road again until October, but Keelor says the current political climate could create an opportunity for the band to do something smaller and more spontaneous.

“Maybe some smaller guerrilla sort of stuff,” he says.

For now, the veteran country rockers are getting used to their unexpected role helping Canadians rage against the American machine.

“We’re very happy to have that line in that song at this particular moment because it is a little bit of a rallying call,” he says.

“If the song galvanizes a mood or an energy in the country, that is amazing.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 31.

Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press