What's in a name? Quite a lot when it comes to a trade war.
President Donald Trump launched a fresh escalation in the growing trade fight between the US and Canada on Tuesday by threatening to rename one of the Great Lakes.
"The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don't expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer," Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning.
The lake, the smallest of the Great Lakes, straddles the US-Canada border, with Canada's biggest city, Toronto, on its northern shore.
On Tuesday, Lake Ontario became the newest battleground in the spat between the two nations over trade.
After Canada walked away from trade negotiations last week, the US imposed a new set of tariffs on its northern neighbor over the weekend.
More of Business Insider's coverage of Canada
The fight escalated on Monday when Trump threatened a plan to impose another batch of 50% tariffs on Canadian-made products. The new tariffs would apply to trucks, auto parts, and steel, and would start on January 1, Trump said.
"Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years," he wrote on Truth Social. "Canada will be treated like a State no longer!"
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threatened a similar retaliation, saying Canada would match the US' tariffs "dollar-for-dollar" from September 8, with a fresh announcement scheduled for Tuesday.
From the Gulf of America to Lake America
If Trump goes through with his threat to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America, it will be the second time he has attempted to change the name of a body of water.
In January 2025, on the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The change was later reflected on Google and Apple Maps in the US, while users outside the US see the area labeled as "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)."
The name Ontario is derived from Ontarí'io, a word meaning "great lake" in the language of the indigenous Wyandot people.
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Will Martin is a senior business editor with 10 years of experience in various roles at Business Insider. He works with a team of reporters and editors to cover everything business, with a special focus on consulting, financial markets, and the aviation industry.Prior to working on the business news team, Will led Insider's sports coverage in the company's London bureau, publishing award-nominated work on alleged gang involvement in elite boxing, deeply-reported features on a civil war in Olympic sport modern pentathlon, and profiles of some of the biggest rising-stars in soccer.Before joining the sports team, Will spent a year as an associate editor on Insider's global news team. Before that, Will worked as a markets and economics reporter for Business Insider for more than three years.During his time with the news team, Will assigned and edited reporting and features on everything from the Boeing 737 Max crisis, to the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China, to global geopolitics, and even a Barack Obama-themed service station in Ireland.He also personally reported on allegations of illegal mass human organ harvesting in China.Prior to working for Insider, Will earned a BA in International Relations from the University of Exeter and an MA in Financial Journalism from City, University of London.
