Mapping Tariffs visualizes the impact of U.S. tariffs on Canadian businesses. “Since May 2025, Tara Vinodrai and Karen Chapple have led a team of researchers at the School of Cities to develop interactive mapping and visualization tools that measure and explore the potential impacts of tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canadian cities and communities at the neighbourhood and city level. Our tools illustrate the highly localized and uneven potential impacts of U.S. tariffs reflecting Canada’s underlying urban, regional and sectoral specializations.” CTV News coverage.
Usually when an island gets left off a map of Canada, it’s Prince Edward Island. Not this time. CBC News: “Hilroy Canada exercise books are known for the map of Canada on the cover. The design for a glossy version of the notebook also features the map but it’s missing some of Canada’s geographical features—namely Newfoundland and Cape Breton.” ACCO Brands, which owns Hilroy, blames a printing error: they’ve stopped distribution and are offering replacements.
Last week the U.S. president did to Lake Ontario what he did to the Gulf of Mexico a year and a half ago: rename it after America. This was part of an ongoing hissy fit against a country—my country—for walking away from trade talks due to demands from the U.S. side that were literally unacceptable.
It was meant to bait us, and in general Canadians have not taken it well (responses ranging from can you believe this doofus to it’s fucking go time). Doug Ford put up a big sign. Blue Rodeo fans screamed the lake’s name at a concert. Our prime minister, Mark Carney, refused to take the bait, issuing the following statement via social media channels:
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.
The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.
Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario—then, now and always.
That’s dry enough that my country’s entire vermouth supply spontaneously combusted. (And yes, we have a leader who can use the word “hydronym” in a social media post.)
Jeff Clark of Clark Geomatics, who’s been producing backcountry recreation maps since 2008, plus some very nice wall maps of British Columbia coastal regions, gets a profile from CBC News. Always nice to see mapmakers make the news.
As provinces and municipalities amend decades-old flood maps and strengthen flood preparedness measures in the face of inclement climate change, a vocal minority of homeowners are pushing back. Some argue governments have failed to properly consult local communities and overlooked personal, on-the-ground mitigation measures. Others say their elected officials are focusing too much on penalizing property owners instead of initiatives that would reduce flood risk. But most express concern about their home values and insurance costs: last year, insurance company Desjardins announced it would no longer offer mortgages in Quebec’s high-risk flood zones.
Per the article, a big part of the problem is that despite flooding being the main risk from climate change, Canada is decades behind relative to other G7 countries in terms of flood planning, so a lot of this is new to people.
Jacob Weinbren has mapped the results of the 2025 Canadian federal election at the polling station level, along with the 2021 results so that we can see how the vote changed. Any project of this kind is going to be insufficient along some axis: because it shows percentages rather than raw votes and is a geographical map, it doesn’t represent the number of votes cast very well, and tracking six parties is a lot for a choropleth map. But for the purposes of seeing the change in voting patterns from 2021 to 2025, it works: I can tell at a glance, for example, that reserves on the Prairies got more Liberal, and my own neck of the woods got a lot more Conservative. Direct link to map here.
Library and Archives Canada has posted a four-part series on early automobile maps to their Facebook page (they don’t have a blog, just social media accounts), featuring examples from their collection: Nova Scotia, Montreal, Banff National Park, Vancouver.
So we’ve had some wildfires on our plate here in Canada. CBC News has a page tracking wildfires in Canada, including maps of wildfire location, risk and smoke. Richard points out that FireSmoke Canada (previously) is a forecast map, not a map of actual conditions, for which see AQMap.ca, which tracks fine particulate (PM2.5) monitors across Canada.
Both Australia and Canada had federal elections last week. Both countries have overwhelmingly urban populations (Australia 87%, Canada 82%) and vast tracts of sparsely populated territory, which means that strictly geographical election maps of both countries suffer from the “empty land doesn’t vote” problem. But that doesn’t seem to stop such maps from being used.
As I posted about the maps of the last Canadian federal election in 2019 (1, 2, 3), most static election maps in Canada use the Lambert projection, whereas online maps generally use Web Mercator; cartograms and such aren’t really a thing. I suspect that this is a combination of the Lambert being very familiar to Canadians (it’s pretty much the default projection for static maps) whereas a cartogram isn’t: it’s easier and less disorienting to use the Lambert with inset maps, or zoom in on Web Mercator. Canadians aren’t dumb: we know that there are lots of seats in and around Toronto and Montreal, and that hardly anyone lives in Nunavut, and even zooming all the way out in Web Mercator won’t fool us. Besides, with four parties capable of winning expansive rural or northern seats, the urban-rural split isn’t quite as binary as it is elsewhere, so the urgency of correcting the map by showing votes or seats—the need to say land doesn’t vote—isn’t quite there.
The decline in passenger rail service in the U.S. and Canada is charted by this interactive map, which uses a slider to compare Amtrak and Via Rail service in 1980 with what it is today. [Maps Mania]
The Yellowhead Treaty Map is an interactive map of the various treaties between the state and Indigenous peoples in Canada. “Covering every Canadian treaty from 1763 to the present, The Treaty Map aims to challenge the commonly held view of treaties as land surrenders and offers a comprehensive, interactive learning and teaching tool, grounded in Indigenous perspectives of treaties.” [Ian Mosby]
Fire forced the closure and evacuation of Jasper National Park this week, and the Jasper townsite itself was directly hit by flames on Wednesday. Parks Canada estimates about a third of the town’s structures have been destroyed. Municipal officials released a preliminary map today showing the damaged and destroyed buildings in the town. They stress that the information “is based on the damage that is visible from the street. We have not been inside buildings or seen the backside of properties. There may be additional damage to homes and businesses that isn’t visible from the street. Buildings marked as ‘not damaged’ on the map could also have internal damage caused by smoke and water. Consider this a preliminary description of properties affected in Jasper.” CBC News coverage.
The Canadian government has launched an interactive map of former Indian residential schools. “The Indian Residential Schools Interactive Map allows users to visualize the location of the 140 former residential school sites recognized in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement as well as provide information on the current status and historical context of the site. The map has a search, filter, measurement and imagery slider to help users with analysis.” The map makes use of historical aerial photography to pinpoint the locations of schools that are no longer standing; many of the sites have since been redeveloped.
The purpose of the map is grim: to determine the potential locations of additional school gravesites. Generations of Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools in Canada: many were subjected to physical and sexual abuse, and thousands died of disease or neglect. In the past few years, unmarked graves have been found at several residential school sites across Canada, and searches are under way at many others. This map makes available to searchers imagery that was otherwise difficult to access. (The imagery is also available as a dataset.) More at the CBC News story.
