Following the controversies around the renaming of Gulf of Mexico, Google has renamed provincial parks in Canada as “state parks’.
Some Google Maps users raised the issue on 23 February after they searched for provincial parks in the country and found that they were renamed as state parks.
While this could have been overlooked as just a bug, the statement by U.S. president Donald Trump that Canada is the 51st U.S. state could be fueling the rage.
A bug? It needs to be fixed
Trump announced prior to his inauguration that Canada is supposed to be the 51st state in the U.S. While that may have been just a casual passing comment, Canadians may not have found it funny.
To put it in perspective, Canada doesn’t have states, but instead provinces. Therefore, there’s no reference to a state park in the country.
Some have excused the naming as a bug, but the idea of Canada being a 51st state is raising suspicion that Trump could be behind the whole act.
“In Canada, we don’t use the word ‘state’ to describe any location, just ‘province or provincial’ So even if this is simply an error, even if they have been tagged this way since google’s inception, it is an error that should be fixed, given the “51st state” rhetoric that trump has been throwing around- it’s offensive.”
If it is a bug, Google needs to fix it fast to avoid getting into another possible issue with its Maps naming places wrongly.
The Google Maps issues
Google has faced fierce criticism because of Google Maps for different reasons. The first was the wrong directions the app was giving users, sometimes risking their lives in the process.
The second and most recent is the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, which has led to a legal threat from the Mexican government.
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