Trump threatens to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America amid Canada trade war

• Donald Trump threatened to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America" amid escalating trade tensions with Canada.
• Canada plans retaliatory tariffs after Trump threatened to raise US tariffs on Canadian cars and trucks to 50% starting in 2027.
• The failed trade deal and tariff threats risk disrupting the integrated US-Canada auto supply chain and increasing costs for manufacturers and consumers.

WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump said on Aug 25 that he was considering changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” as a trade war between his country 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,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

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.

Asked about Trump’s comment, Canada’s minister responsible for US trade, Dominic LeBlanc, said that 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,” he said in an interview on CNBC.

The 80-year-old US leader’s threat to rename Lake Ontario comes after he changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in January 2025 upon returning to the White House.

LeBlanc also said that he thought his government could announce retaliatory tariffs on the US on Aug 25, a day after Trump threatened to raise US tariffs on all cars and trucks from Canada to 50 per cent.

“I think that’s the government intention,” he said when asked on CNBC when the tariffs on goods imported from the US might be announced.

“It shouldn’t surprise anybody. Our friends and the American administration, we said that if we didn’t get to a deal, we would have to take the steps that any responsible government would take to protect those sectors of the economy. Our preference was not to do that,” he said.

Trump on Aug 24 threatened to raise tariffs on all cars, trucks and automotive parts from Canada to 50 per cent starting on Jan 1, 2027, escalating a trade fight after negotiations collapsed last week.

The trade deal on the table would have cut the top-line tariff rate on Canadian cars and light-duty trucks from 25 per cent to 15 per cent and the tariffs on aluminium and steel from 50 per cent to 25 per cent, but the deal fell apart on Aug 21 over a number of points of contention, including whether the US tariff relief would have applied to medium- or heavy-duty trucks.

The escalation threatens to disrupt one of the world’s most integrated car supply chains. US car production is heavily reliant on Canadian-made parts and vehicles, and higher tariffs could raise costs for US carmakers and consumers while deepening a trade stand-off that has already weighed on auto stocks. REUTERS