CBC News explores how places in Ontario receive new names. There are hundreds of thousands of unnamed places in the province, and at the rate new names are being approved by the Ontario Geographic Names Board, it’s likely to stay that way: 85 new names have been approved in the past five years. On the other hand, 54 proposed names were rejected for not failing to meet the rules, which the article digs into:
The Ontario Geographic Names Board is guided by a strict list of naming rules. Submissions can’t have the same name as another nearby feature. Bad words are not allowed, nor are names that could seem like advertisements.
When it comes to people, a name won’t be considered unless that person has been dead for at least five years. Even then, there’s niche criteria. The person needs to have left a legacy either locally, provincially or nationally.
There’s even a rule about not naming something to commemorate a victim of an accident or a tragedy if they didn’t leave some sort of other legacy.
