Our Maps are Under Assault

You’ve seen it in the news: US President Trump has signed an executive order that, henceforth, Lake Ontario is to be known as Lake America.

With the stroke of the presidential pen, a 400-year-old geographical name bites the dust!

In Trump’s dreams...

But he isn’t the only one who’s tinkering with our maps. Much closer to home, right here in enlightened BC, various movements are afoot to launder or otherwise revise numerous geographical place names.

We’ll look at some of these recent or impending alterations to our maps—and, perhaps, to our consciences—in this week’s BC Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s answer to “Lake America.” —PBS

promoPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerSeptember 10, 2026

Black Wednesday Spelled Death For the Coal Dust Twins

Way back in the Dark Ages, 1977 to be exact, I completed a three-week-long blitz of dozens of southern mainland B.C. ghost towns while researching a never completed series of books on the subject.

non-membersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerJanuary 13, 2022Disasters, non-members

COVID-19: Great Depression Rerun?

There was an old house in Victoria West, immediately beside Tillicum Road and just a block or so shy of the Burnside Road intersection, that my mother would point out to me from time to time. The fact that she repeated herself told me that she had reason to remember it well. Once operated as a Relief store, it was where, as a child, her parents, armed with a relief voucher from some government agency or church, had bought her a “new” Christmas coat.

Are they out there? John Magor’s UFOs

I’ve never been able to quite believe in UFOs (flying saucers). Or Sasquatch. Or ghosts.

Mind you, I’ve wavered a few times, if only briefly; sometimes from reading or hearing particularly credible news reports or solid firsthand accounts of alleged sightings. Mostly, my skepticism has come closest to losing its resolve after

Victoria’s House of Horrors

This grisly tale of Victoria’s ‘Pest House’ was originally set down in print more than a century ago by Victoria journalist and politician D.W. Higgins. By then Higgins, who’d come to B.C. for the Fraser River gold rush, was retired and enjoying the role of raconteur in a weekly article in the Colonist.

non-membersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerApril 8, 2020Victoria Crime, non-members

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