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.” Related: ‘Now and Always’: Doug Ford unveils Lake Ontario sign amid U.S.

tariff war Chow says Trump should ‘take a page from Dolly Parton’ after threat to rename Lake Ontario Indigenous leaders condemn Trump’s move to rename Lake Ontario “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.

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. 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.

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.