By Katharine Jackson
WASHINGTON, Aug 25 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he was considering changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” and denied that a rift over French language requirements contributed to a breakdown in trade talks between the U.S. and Canada.
“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 wrote in a post on Truth Social.
One of the five Great Lakes of North America, Lake Ontario borders both the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.
Asked about Trump’s comment, Canada’s minister responsible for U.S. trade, Dominic LeBlanc, said Canada would not respond to social media posts by the U.S. administration.
“We’ve decided as a federal government months ago not to respond to sort of the daily social media posts of either the president or his cabinet secretaries,” LeBlanc said in an interview on CNBC.
Such a move is unlikely to have any practical impact on resolving the trade war started by the U.S. president. Trump — who has long cast himself as a master dealmaker — is also struggling to end the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that he launched earlier this year, which has driven up global energy prices.
“I think it’s a lot of rhetoric because we’re the No.1 customer to 17 states, No.2 to 12 others. Ontario alone, if Ontario was just standalone, would be the third-largest trading partner in the world,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said in a CNN interview.
Trump’s threat to rename Lake Ontario comes after he issued an executive order in January 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
FRENCH VS ENGLISH
Trade talks between the U.S. and Canada collapsed last week with each side blaming the other for derailing three days of intensive negotiations.
In a separate post on Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump said disagreement over Canada’s French-language requirements did not contribute to the collapse.
“I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French! In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing,” he wrote.
“This lie was made up by a weak and ineffective Prime Minister in an attempt to gain political support, which he has totally lost, from the people of Quebec. I love French Canadians!”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at a press conference on Monday that the trade deal faltered after U.S. negotiators proposed changes that put Canada’s French-language rules at risk.
The U.S. has demanded that Canada roll back new legal requirements for streaming services providers to prioritize French language content for Quebec. The U.S. Trade Representative had listed the requirements as a trade barrier in its 2026 National Trade Estimate report.
English and French are the official languages of Canada and have equal status, rights and privileges under its Constitution.
In Quebec, where 80% of the population speaks French, Trump is more disliked than anywhere else in Canada, polling data shows.
According to August data from the pollster Angus Reid, only 10% of people from Quebec have a favorable view of Trump and even a deal to lower tariffs would be unlikely to reverse public opinion.
(Reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Katharine Jackson; additional reporting by David Lawder and Caroline Stauffer; editing by Michelle Nichols and Deepa Babington)
Comments