I haven’t followed all the discussion on talk-ca and talk-us about how to tag the North American Great Lakes, but when looking into this problem:
I did run across mention of this consensus:
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/754#issuecomment-49939285
and so I’ve started to tag the edges of Lake Ontario as “natural=coastline” to bring Ontario into consistency with the other Great Lakes.
This may violate someone else’s notion of what “natural=coastline” is meant for, but until such time as there is another method brought into practical use for rending the Great Lakes a) at a reasonable zoom level (eg, they are big enough that they should show at the default zoomlevel of 5) and b) consistently (eg, showing all 5 lakes, instead of just 4 of the lakes at zoom 5), this seems to me a reasonable compromise.
If you disagree, please implement a different fix.
Discussion
Comment from Minh Nguyen on 31 August 2015 at 21:04
Here’s the most recent discussion on the talk-us mailing list (crossposted to talk-ca). It sounds like
natural=coastline
is indeed preferred by the community.Comment from malenki on 9 September 2015 at 17:20
A discussion in February about the same topic with the hint that natural=coastline was already agreed on: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.openstreetmap/71540