Tech giant Google faced widespread criticism over the weekend for becoming the first major online map provider to change the name of "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" for its US users, after President Donald Trump ordered the name change in…
Page A9From§Eachthe midnight edition — 31 August 2026
Trump says he wants 'nothing Canadian'; Google renames a lake, GM invests $791 million there
As it ran on the front
You gotta love the sequencing on this one. The President stands up and says, in his own words, 'I don't want Canadian anything.' Not tariffs on Canadian steel, not trade with Canadian anything — nothing. A blanket statement. And within the same news cycle, two things happen that make that sentence look like a punchline somebody else wrote for him.
First, Google Maps renames Lake Ontario to 'Lake America' following his executive order, because apparently the fastest way to erase Canada is to relabel the parts of it we already share a border with. That's not policy, that's a font change. You didn't get rid of Canada, you got rid of the label, and everybody driving to Toronto is going to find out real fast the water didn't move.…
…(cont) Second — and this is the part that should bother you if you've got a 401k or a union card — General Motors just signed a union deal worth $791.3 million, and where's that money going? Canadian auto factories. While the President is on record not wanting anything Canadian, the actual company building actual cars is putting three-quarters of a billion dollars into actual Canadian plants, because of tariff pressure the President himself created. So the tariffs didn't bring the jobs home. They just made it more expensive to not invest in Canada.
This is the con, plain as day: the rhetoric is for you, the guy watching the news, and the money moves are for the boardroom, which doesn't watch the news, it reads the filings. You get a renamed lake. The auto industry gets a hedge against the tariffs your own government imposed. Nobody asked which one actually changes your life.
And look, I'm not saying the lake thing is nothing — it's a company bending a map to match a mood. But bend a map, don't bend a supply chain, and this week we got proof the supply chain didn't bend either. It just went where the labor's cheaper and the tariffs don't reach. That's the whole racket in two headlines and a lake.
“He says he doesn't want anything Canadian and somehow a lake gets renamed before a single General Motors dollar stops flowing north — the tariffs didn't bring the jobs home, they just made Canada more expensive to insult.”
“The $791 million investment reflects standard cross-border manufacturing efficiency, not tariff avoidance — and the lake, that's just cartography catching up to policy. Did I say policy? I mean branding.”
The receipts
President Trump said Sunday he does not want U.S. businesses to import Canadian goods amid continued tariff tensions between the two countries. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said his tariffs “revived, and indeed saved” the American…
The investment comes as Canada's auto sector grapples with 25% U.S. tariffs on vehicles, with President Trump pledging to double them to 50% on Jan. 1.
Google updated its Maps application on Sunday in adherence with an executive order President Donald Trump signed on Thursday that renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America. Titled, “Honoring the American history of the Great Lakes and renaming…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.