Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Sunday mocked President Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” saying the move resembled “something out of ‘Saturday Night Live.'” Ford has traded barbs with the president many times…
Page A3From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Trump renames Lake Ontario 'Lake America' as Google Maps complies amid trade war warnings
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what happened here, because the coverage has gotten this backwards. The administration renamed Lake Ontario 'Lake America' as a gesture of confidence — a show of American resolve at a moment when confidence is exactly what the market needs. Google Maps updated the label for US phones within days. That is not government overreach, that's actually a private company voluntarily aligning its cartography with executive branding, which, if I'm being honest, is a pretty remarkable show of corporate — okay, it's not voluntary, nobody at Google woke up and decided Lake Ontario needed a rebrand, but the point stands that —
Look. Doug Ford can compare this to Saturday Night Live all he wants. Doug Ford also called a trade war with the United States potentially devastating for both countries, so maybe he should pick a lane: is the administration a farce or a threat? He can't have — he can't have both. Actually he can have both, that's kind of the problem, isn't it.…
…(cont) Here's the actual talking point, and I want to deliver it straight: renaming a body of water shared with a sovereign nation, in the middle of trade negotiations that same nation's premier calls potentially devastating, is a show of strength. It signals resolve. It signals that America does not simply respond to a trade war, America draws the map it's fighting over. That's not petty. That's — I'm told that's not the read people are getting.
I want to be careful here because I've now said 'strength' and 'petty' in the same paragraph about a lake, and I recognize how that sounds. Let me try again. The name change costs nothing. It requires no legislation, no budget line, no vote. It is, in the most literal sense, free — which is more than can be said for the trade relationship it's currently overshadowing on the news cycle. Maybe that's not incompetence. Maybe that's the plan. A free, weightless controversy, dropped on top of an actual, expensive one, so that the guy asking about tariffs on his lawn furniture ends up arguing about a map instead.
I did not mean to say that. Strike that. The name is 'Lake America.' It is a fine name. Google agreed. That's the column.
“Look, when a country's premier says a trade war would be devastating and the response is renaming a lake, that's not a coincidence, that's a distraction wearing a name tag. Google didn't relabel a map out of civic pride, a phone call outranks a map every time. Keep your eyes on the tariffs, not the water.”
“This is a show of confidence, not a distraction — the two things people keep pretending are in tension aren't in — well, they might be in tension, actually, but a strong America names its own lakes, that's not usually a talking point I have to defend but here we are.”
The receipts
Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Sunday said that President Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America" resembled "something out of 'Saturday Night Live.'" Ford slammed Trump's trade war with Canada that placed a 50 percent…
Ford also called Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario "disappointing."
Google Maps on Saturday changed the name of Lake Ontario to "Lake America" for U.S. users, while keeping the name intact for Canadian Google users and carrying both names for international users, following President Trump's executive order…
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has unveiled a giant billboard reading: "Lake Ontario — Now and Always." But tech giant Google has said it is renaming the lake for U.S. users, as President Trump demanded.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.