Lake Ontario is the distraction

Apparently, this is where Canadian American relations have arrived. The President of the United States is renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” while the Premier of Ontario is putting up a giant sign beside the QEW reminding him that it is, and always will be, Lake Ontario.

Donald Trump’s latest naming exercise is ridiculous and there is no need to pretend otherwise. It has the feel of a spoiled child discovering that he can write on the walls because someone gave him the marker. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and now Lake Ontario has become the next target in his tiresome campaign of all-American bluster.

Doug Ford’s response has not exactly elevated the conversation. Only days before unveiling his enormous “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” sign near Grimsby, Ford told Trump to “Kiss my a–,” prompting the inevitable response from Trump. So here we are, with the President of the United States and the Premier of Canada’s largest province trading insults while everyone else rushes to choose a side.

Great. We are back to acting like teenage girls in high school, except this cafeteria fight involves two governments responsible for one of the largest bilateral economic relationships on earth.

Then came the funniest part of the entire story.

Almost immediately after Ford unveiled his sign defending Lake Ontario, people discovered that maps on Ontario government and public agency websites, including Hydro One, Metrolinx, Infrastructure Ontario and the LCBO, were displaying “Lake America.” Why? These very Canadian institutions use mapping technology and data supplied by Google, an American company. Ontario was putting up a sign defending Canadian sovereignty while some of its own digital infrastructure was importing the American name.

You could hardly write the satire better.

More importantly, however, it accidentally illustrates something Canadians seem increasingly reluctant to admit. For all the elbows up rhetoric, patriotic advertising and talk about freeing ourselves from the United States, our two countries are extraordinarily intertwined. That is not necessarily a weakness. It is economic geography.

Even after a year of trade tensions and efforts to diversify, 71.7 per cent of Canadian merchandise exports went to the United States in 2025. Ontario’s number was identical. We can wish ourselves economically independent from America, but wishing does not change where our customers, suppliers, infrastructure, and capital are located.

The Trump administration understands this very well. In fact, it understands it well enough to use that dependence as leverage. Canadians may understandably dislike the bullying, threats and tariffs, but indignation is not an economic strategy. If Washington knows that access to the American market matters enormously to Canadian businesses, while we convince ourselves that buying a few Canadian products and shouting “elbows up” has somehow changed the equation, guess which side enters the negotiation with the clearer understanding of its leverage?

That should concern us far more than what Trump calls Lake Ontario.

Ontario’s economy needs investment, productivity growth, affordable energy, competitive taxation, faster permitting, housing that workers can afford and an environment where entrepreneurs want to risk their money. Instead, we repeatedly allow ourselves to become consumed by political theatre because political theatre is easy.

A 24-foot sign makes a great photograph and a profanity makes a great headline. Trump’s latest insult generates clicks. Fixing productivity, housing costs, infrastructure, investment and government spending is painfully boring by comparison.

The media bears a lot of responsibility for this. Trump throws a shiny object into the room, and everyone chases it. Ford knows how to play the same game. Meanwhile, the difficult questions about competitiveness, deficits, investment, and the cost of living get pushed farther down the page.

Put up the sign if you must. Have a laugh. We will always call it Lake Ontario, because that is what people have called it for generations, long before the province of Ontario even existed as a geographical construct of European settlement.

Premier Ford, please get back to your real job and break your addiction with the camera and the headline. Lives are at stake, our families need an economic future, not another sign.