Trump floats Lake America name amid Canada dispute
Tuesday, 25 August 2026 20:07
United States President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is considering renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” as the US-Canada trade dispute escalates, Al Jazeera reported.
“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Asked about the comment, Canada’s minister responsible for US trade, Dominic LeBlanc, said Ottawa would not respond to social media posts by the US administration. “We’ve decided as a federal government months ago not to respond to sort of the daily social media posts of either the president or his cabinet secretaries,” LeBlanc said in an interview on CNBC.
Canada was expected to announce retaliatory measures on Tuesday after the Trump administration enacted 50 percent tariffs on $20bn of Canadian goods over the weekend. Trade talks between the countries had broken down, and the new tariffs affect products including wine, furniture, dairy products, cement, clothing, fishing rods and hockey equipment, accounting for 5.5 percent of Canadian exports to the US.
Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America and borders the Canadian province of Ontario and the US state of New York. Ontario is Canada’s most populous province and home to the country’s car industry.
The rhetoric has escalated, with Trump telling Canadian leaders on Monday to “fall in line” or face consequences “far WORSE” than existing tariffs. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accused Washington of “trying to subordinate his country” and said US trade demands showed it wanted to “destroy our major industries”, including cars, steel and aluminium.
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