On a summer stay in one of the many tall towers on Toronto’s waterfront, I watched Lake Ontario change shades as the clouds rolled in. Steely grey with whitecaps as the storm approached, a roiling black when the squall struck, and variegated shades along a spectrum of azure and cyan after the sun reemerged. At times like these, entranced by this resplendent waterbody, it is hard not to feel like it is my lake.
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Folks new to the Great Lakes sometimes ask if there is a tide or taste it to see if it is saltwater; in their defence, these “sweetwater seas” look like the ocean, the horizon a meeting of water and sky. Despite the ocean-like appearance, this is assuredly freshwater—“no salt and no sharks,” as the bumper stickers say. Even though American water narratives disproportionately stress the scarcity of the wet stuff on account of the arid west, a dearth of water is hard to imagine when looking across any of the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario alone has more surface freshwater than all the American Southwest put together.
Lake Ontario is the fourteenth-largest lake in the world by surface area and the eleventh largest in volume. It has a surface area of 18,960 kilometres2 (7,340 miles2), an average depth of eighty-six metres (283 feet), and a maximum depth of 244 metres (802 feet). The lake is longest east to west, but it is wide enough in the north–south direction that you cannot see from shore to shore—that is, unless you are at the narrower western end, where you can discern the top of the tallest downtown Toronto buildings on a clear day from the opposite shore (the tourist towers of Niagara Falls, as well as the mist plume from the waterfall, are, in turn, visible from the observation deck of the CN Tower).
Google Maps will tell you that it takes about eight hours to drive around the whole lake, provided you are going at freeway speed and excepting the time it takes to cross the international border. Incidentally, the fastest time to swim across Lake Ontario was just a shade under fifteen hours (since teenager Marilyn Bell made the first recorded cross-lake swim in the 1950s, from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Toronto, almost seventy others have repeated her marathon crossing).
Whether Lake Ontario is viewed from a Toronto tower, an Oswego fort, a boat offshore of Kingston, or a cottage by Rochester, it is a view of abundance. This liquid lavishness has fostered economic, cultural, and political systems built on expectations of abundance and growth. And this water wealth is more than partly responsible for the amity—United States president Donald Trump’s recent attempt to unilaterally rename Lake Ontario as Lake America notwithstanding—that has characterized the last two centuries of the Canada–US relationship, promoting co-operation rather than the conflict that tends to result from scarcity.
The border separating Canada from the United States, and Ontario from New York State, is out there in Lake Ontario, somewhere, equally invisible from up close or far away. To the water and the biotic life within, as well as the precipitation and climate above it, the border is imperceptible. That border, nevertheless, matters.
The word “Ontario” may be derived from Kaniatarí:io or Oniatarí:io, Iroquoian terms that can be translated as “lake of shining waters” or “beautiful lake,” though there remains debate about this etymology. Lake Ontario’s surface is around 245 feet (seventy-six metres) above mean sea level. This makes it the lowest of the five Great Lakes—and by an appreciable margin, as the water surfaces of the other Great Lakes, including Erie, are more than twice as many feet above sea level.
To get from Lake Ontario to the level of the upper lakes, one has to climb over 300 vertical feet, no small task if you need to move a boat, let alone any cargo. Lake Ontario is also the lowest in the sense that it is the first of the Great Lakes encountered when moving up the St. Lawrence from the Atlantic. This orientation explains how Lake Superior received its name: not from its obvious grandeur and size, which many might assume, but from the French word “supérieur” for upper, or highest, lake in the Great Lakes chain. Lake Ontario is the “lowest” of the Great Lakes in another way still: the extent to which it has been brought low by human degradation. Lake Ontario seems, anecdotally speaking, the least appreciated of all the Great Lakes.
Lake Ontario is shared by two subnational political jurisdictions, Ontario and New York State, with the surface area of the lake split almost evenly between the two. The Lake Ontario watershed is home to about 11 million people (9 million Ontarians and 2 million New Yorkers), a figure that has grown by 40 percent in the last two decades. Lake Ontario was the first of the five lakes heavily settled by Europeans, and it now has the largest lakeside population of any of the transborder Great Lakes (only Lake Michigan, entirely in the US, has a larger population close to the water).
If population growth continues to follow projections, Lake Ontario will be the most populated Great Lake within a few decades. Most of the residents in the watershed are concentrated in the Golden Horseshoe that runs from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Oshawa, encompassing St. Catharines, Hamilton, Burlington, Mississauga, Toronto, Scarborough, Pickering, and other communities. In fact, there are more Canadians living in the Lake Ontario watershed than in the rest of the Great Lakes combined.
In the past few centuries, Lake Ontario became the most politically and economically important Great Lake, at least from a Canadian perspective. The Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence system tied together the territories that initially formed the country of Canada while also furnishing a fluid connection to the imperial centre, Britain. Lake Ontario, along with the two principal rivers that flow in and out of it, forms the Canadian heartland, and, in many ways, the lake directed the resource exploitation and economic trajectories of Canada and Ontario.
All of Canada’s historical capitals, and those of the two biggest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, are intimately connected to the Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence system. Canada’s largest city and urban conglomeration, Toronto and the GTA, grew into the contemporary industrial and financial hub of the country because of Lake Ontario. Similarly, Ontario derives not only its name but much of its economic and political clout from the lake.
Lake Ontario has served as both a bridge and a barrier between Canada and the United States, facilitating interactions and transborder integration in some ways, while impeding them in others. Though Lake Ontario was central to the evolution of the Canadian nation-state, it was much more peripheral to the national imaginary of the US. Likewise, Ontario identifies more strongly with Lake Ontario than the State of New York does. Even though it is the Great Lake that looms largest in the Canadian consciousness, by the twentieth century, Lake Ontario became seen mostly as a passive backdrop or a resource to be appropriated, rather than a dynamic waterscape supporting essential relationships between the natural world and the human enterprise.
Lake Ontario is the Great Lake most affected by human-built control works, which include dams and water regulation infrastructures in its major tributary and distributary. The lake’s water levels, water quality, and biological diversity changed dramatically over the past few centuries, especially since the mid-twentieth century. New environmental regulations in the second half of the century achieved only mixed results. Lake Ontario became the most degraded of the five Great Lakes. Limited improvement in lake conditions in recent decades, and the ongoing emergence of new and unforeseen problems, point to a recurring theme: Lake Ontario’s remarkable resilience juxtaposed with its apparent vulnerability.
