Canada erects giant ‘Lake Ontario’ sign as spat with Trump over name escalates

US President Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the Ontario premier erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA.

Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa. Trump’s order for the US government to refer to Lake Ontario as Lake America by Sunday had at least one prominent impact. Google Maps had changed Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America for US users to reflect the president’s executive renaming order.

In a statement explaining why it was acquiescing to Trump’s desired name for Lake Ontario, Google said its practice is to “reflect name changes in official government sources”. Trump’s order affects the US’s federal Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), “which sets the standard for official US maps”, the tech company said, and that it doesn’t have any impact on Canadian naming conventions or ​how the rest of the ‌world refers to the ‌lake.

Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney has flat-out rejected the renaming, explaining that Lake Ontario derives from an Indigenous Wendat word meaning “the lake is beautiful, the lake is great” that dates back more than 400 years.

With talks to resolve the trade dispute stalled, Trump issued an executive order on Thursday directing US agencies that the lake was now Lake America, much like an earlier dispute in his second presidency with Mexico, which saw Trump direct US agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.