Trump floats renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America during Canada trade war

Lake Ontario borders both the Canadian province of Ontario and the US state of New York.

United States President Donald Trump says he is considering changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America as the trade war between the US and Canada escalates.

“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 on Tuesday in a post on his Truth Social platform.

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The move would be similar to how Trump sought to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America through an executive order last year.

Asked about Trump’s comment, Canada’s minister responsible for US trade, Dominic LeBlanc, said Canada 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.

The US and Canada are locked in a trade dispute with Canada expected to announce retaliatory measures on Tuesday. That’s in response to the Trump administration enacting 50 percent tariffs on $20bn of Canadian goods over the weekend after trade talks between the countries broke down.The new tariffs affect products that include wine, furniture, dairy products, cement, clothing, fishing rods and hockey equipment – or 5.5 percent of Canadian exports to the US.

One of the five Great Lakes of North America, Lake Ontario borders both the Canadian province of Ontario and the US state of New York. Ontario is Canada’s most populous province and is home to the country’s car industry.

The rhetoric between the two countries is escalating with Trump telling Canadian leaders on Monday to “fall in line” or face consequences “far WORSE” than existing tariffs. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has accused Washington of trying to subordinate his country.

Trump also threatened new 50 percent tariffs on Canadian vehicles, car parts and steel while Carney said US trade demands showed that Washington wanted to “destroy our major industries”, including cars, steel and aluminium.

Canada and the US share one of the world’s largest trading relationships with deeply integrated supply chains across the car, energy, agriculture and manufacturing industries, making a prolonged trade fight potentially costly for businesses and workers on both sides of the border.