After trade negotiations between the US and Canada collapsed, the two countries' leaders have turned on each other — and the name of a lake has become the unlikely battleground.
Here's how it all unfolded. Canadian PM Mark Carney walked away from a trade deal with the US ahead of a US tariff deadline, arguing the terms would do more harm than good back home — Canadian officials were willing to bend on some American demands but rejected the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.
It's a rare move for a US trading partner, and Carney made it, with Ontario Premier Doug Ford backing him up and calling the proposed deal a bad one for the province's steel and auto sectors.
Trump responded by threatening to raise tariffs to 50%, a $20 billion hit on Canadian goods, plus a threat to apply 50% to all cars and trucks starting New Year's Day.
During his remarks responding to the tariff threats, Ford called Trump a "dictator," a "loser" and "the king of bankruptcies," said he wouldn't "take lessons off President Trump," and told reporters the President could "kiss my ass," adding, "I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so he has a lot of room." He described Trump as the kind of guy in school "that would take your lunch money one day, take your toque off your head the next day and then steal your running shoes."
Trump fired back on Truth Social, calling Carney and Ford "clowns" who should "fall in line," warning "the consequences for Canada will be far worse," and posting that "America has been carrying Canada for decades, but no longer!"
He dismissed Ford's comments as "lots of bluster" from "the less charismatic, intelligent and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford." Ford responded: "I don't respond to a dictator like President Trump."
On Aug. 27, Trump signed an executive order declaring Lake Ontario would be renamed "Lake America," announcing in the Oval Office that it was "official, effective immediately," that he'd "filed all the necessary papers," and that everyone who needed notifying had been notified.
The order's rationale: since "the deepest parts of the Lake's waters" sit in US territory, "the United States claims most of the Lake's volume." Asked what message he was sending Canada, Trump said "No message," adding that Canada "has been ripping us off for a long time on trade" and that Canadians "want to be treated like a state, but they're not a state." It's the second time Trump has renamed an international body of water, after January's Gulf of America.
Trump also said: "We have a gulf and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean."
Carney pushed back on X, noting the name comes from the Wendat word Ontari'io — "the lake is beautiful, the lake is big" — and is more than 400 years old, "predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America."
He added that "Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always."
There's a limit to what the order can do on its own, as one Canadian maritime attorney told NBC News, the Americans "can call it whatever they want to call it. It is Lake Ontario." But the major mapmakers have fallen in line.
After the US Geographic Names Information System updated its database, Google Maps adopted "Lake America" for US users over the weekend, and Apple Maps followed on Sept. 1 — a change Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said came after Trump "reached out to Apple directly."
In each case, US users see "Lake America," Canadian users still see "Lake Ontario," and international users see both, the same split the companies used after the Gulf of America renaming. One holdout: navigation app MapQuest publicly declined, tweeting "Name it whatever you want at your leisure" — a post that briefly pushed it to the top of Apple's App Store navigation chart.
Canadian officials have said they won't use the new name regardless of what the maps show. What began as a dispute over steel and aluminum tariffs now runs through the name of a shared body of water — with the underlying question, on both sides of the border, being what the escalation means for the price and flow of goods across one of the world's busiest trade borders.
Call it Lake Ontario or Lake America — the tariffs are the part that shows up on the receipt
