“Lake Ontario was a huge animal with magnetic lines stretching out from it in all directions, pulling you towards it, a huge animal that wanted to be looked at and admired by the millions of tiny human fleas (four million Canadian and two million American) who lived around it and dumped their garbage into it … Lake Ontario was deep, cold, remote, ancient, and always full of strange beauty. You glanced at it from any angle and received your momentary blessing, a moment of clarity, and then you turned back into the murk of your life.”
– David McFadden, A Trip Around Lake Ontario, 1988
Lake Ontario gets its name from the Iroquoian word kanadario, which has been translated to mean “beautiful lake” or “sparkling water” — descriptions that may surprise those who associate its western end with Canada’s urban and industrial heartland. Further east, when you’re travelling through small towns and rural farmland on the American and Canadian sides of the lake, these depictions feel more appropriate.
The lake evolved out of glacial-era Lake Iroquois, whose legacy also includes the ridge Toronto’s Casa Loma sits on, and the Scarborough Bluffs. Water flows in from Lake Erie via the Niagara River, where over 168,000 cubic metres of water rush over Niagara Falls every minute. It then flows out to the St. Lawrence River, before continuing its long journey to the Atlantic Ocean. While Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes in surface area (19,009 square kilometres), it ranks second in average depth (86 metres) and fourth in volume (1,639 cubic kilometres).
Satellite image of Lake Ontario taken during late autumn. (Jeff Schmaltz/NASA Earth Observatory/Wikimedia)
Ontario’s 49 per cent forest cover puts it in the middle of the Great Lakes pack. Its deciduous forest includes ash, basswood, beech, cedar, oak, and sugar maple. The fertile land surrounding the lake allowed the Niagara Peninsula, Prince Edward County, and western New York to become prime production and tourist areas for orchards and wineries.
Historically, the south side of the lake was the heart of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, whose component nations include the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and, from 1722, the Tuscarora. Originally an agrarian culture, the Haudenosaunee engaged in the Beaver Wars against the French and their Algonquian allies to control the fur trade. In 1710, four chiefs travelled to England to meet with Queen Anne to secure an alliance with Great Britain, on whose side the Confederacy fought during the French and Indian War. The majority remained with the British during the American Revolution, and many went with Joseph Brant west from New York to the present-day Six Nations of the Grand River reserve.
Haudenosaunee’s Legendary Founding
Other Indigenous nations around the lake include the Mississaugas, whose settlement area included the present-day Greater Toronto Area, which was a nexus of Indigenous trade routes. Later relocated to the New Credit reserve, the Mississaugas received a $145 million settlement in 2010 for the land claim in the GTA.
Along with the Haudenosaunee, United Empire Loyalists moved into British-controlled areas of the lake. Their influence was key to establishing Upper Canada — the present-day province of Ontario — and their name lives on in the scenic Loyalist Parkway that runs along the lake between Trenton and Kingston. Both the Indigenous nations and the Loyalists were drawn into the War of 1812, when the lake and its surrounding lands became a battlefront against the Americans. Famous battles took place in such locations as Stoney Creek in the west and Oswego and Sacket’s Harbour in the east. Anger over the destruction and looting conducted by the Americans during the Battle of York (present-day Toronto) in 1813 prompted the British to burn down Washington, D.C., in retaliation the following year.
Image from 1836 of the Battle of Queenston (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), October 13th, 1812. (James Dennis/TPL Digital Archive)
With peace came economic growth through the construction of the Erie and Welland Canals during the 1820s. As the Erie Canal prompted development further inland along the New York side of the lake, the lone major American city located close to the lake is Rochester (211,328). By contrast, the Golden Horseshoe houses the largest concentration of people in Canada, led by Toronto (2,794,356), Mississauga (717,961), and Hamilton (569,353).
Tourism along the lake developed during the mid-19th century, and regular passenger services crossed the lake and beyond. “Nothing can be more delightful than sailing on its magnificent bosom, on a beautiful summer night,” W.S. Hunter observed in his 1857 travel book Hunter’s Panoramic Guide From Niagara to Quebec. “But when a storm arises, its placid character is gone, and we are made to feel that it is a sea in power, and may be so in swift destructiveness.”
Bathers, Lake Ontario, Port Dalhousie Beach, 1910. (TPL Digital Archive)
Besides expanding economic opportunities and turning Lake Ontario into a major shipping route, the canals also allowed invasive species like sea lampreys to enter the upper Great Lakes. As a result of such species and the effects of overfishing and pollution, around 10 fish species have gone extinct (15 others have invaded).
Agricultural and industrial pollution, compounded by the pressures of urban development, led to eight zones around the lake being designated as “areas of concern” during the 1980s. Though Ontario’s reputation never sank as low as Erie’s, the lake also became a chemical soup, containing toxins like DDT, lead, mercury, and PCBs, as well as algae-promoting detergents.
(NOAA Great Lakes Food Web Diagrams)
The state of the lake’s pollution was all too evident when, in August 1987, swimmer Vicki Keith became the first person to complete a two-way crossing of Ontario. She was unsettled by the murk she swam through, especially during one stretch near St. Catharines. A few days after her 56-hour swim, she told the Kingston Whig-Standard, “I was swimming through brown scum that just didn’t cover the surface but went down this deep” and used her hands to sketch out about a foot of distance. “I wasn’t taking a chance swallowing any of that.” When her swim finished, Keith noted that she had lost her sense of taste. Despite this experience, the following summer, she became the first swimmer to cross all five Great Lakes.
Legal measures implemented since the 1970s have facilitated the recovery of some fish stocks, and a sport fishery has emerged with introduced species like salmon. A 2019 provincial government report on the lake’s fishery noted that pickerel, rainbow trout, and walleye populations were stable and that brown trout had recovered to numbers not seen since the 1990s.
Artist and activist Sarain Fox on Lake Ontario.
"This is good fish," Hannah Harrison, a researcher with the Coastal Routes Project observed in a 2021 interview with The Narwhal about the state of the Lake Ontario fishery. "You know where it came from, you can be sure about the labour practices behind that fish, you can be sure the species is actually what’s on the label and it had a relatively small carbon footprint to get to you. In this age of the locavore ... this is that food resource."
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