Washington (United States) (AFP) – Google redesignated Lake Ontario as “Lake America” on maps seen by US users Sunday after President Donald Trump announced he was renaming the body of water, with a Canadian official slamming the cross-border tensions as “absolutely backwards.” People in Canada will still see the body of water labeled Lake Ontario, the Indigenous-rooted name used since the 17th century, on their devices and computers, the US-based tech giant said.
The nomenclatural spat erupted as the latest element of Trump’s “America First” narrative, with the longtime allies ramping up a trade war that has seen Washington and Ottawa slap tit-for-tat tariffs on each other. Trump launched a new salvo of criticism Sunday, taking aim at the auto industry — even as the United States and Canada have deeply interconnected auto manufacturing sectors, with a hefty amount of Canadian parts used in US-made vehicles. “I don’t want Canadian cars, I don’t want Canadian parts, I don’t want Canadian anything,” Trump seethed in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Apple as of Sunday has maintained the name Lake Ontario on its Maps app, which comes installed on iPhones in the United States. Google said it made its change in line with the US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), the official federal database for geographic names. “Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the US, people using Maps in the US will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the US and Canada will see both names,” Google said on its blog.
The change mirrors Trump’s unilateral altering of the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in January 2025 — a move Mexico has also rejected. Ontario is the smallest by surface area of the five Great Lakes, which straddle the Canada-US border between Ontario province and the US state of New York. The province’s premier, Doug Ford, offered fresh criticism Sunday of the trade dispute and Trump’s lake name change. “It’s absolutely backwards. It was like something out of (US comedy TV show) ‘Saturday Night Live’ when he signed a document saying — changed to ‘Lake America.’ No one’s going to call it Lake of America,” Ford told ABC talk show “This Week.” “It’s just so disappointing,” he said.
Ford also warned that while a trade war would harm both countries, “it’d be definitely devastating on the US” given that Canada has been by far the largest purchaser of US vehicles. Should those buys dry up, US auto factories would be hit hard. “A tariff on Canada is nothing more than a tax on American people,” he said. “It’s probably the worst move you could ever do.”
In his comments, Trump highlighted the success of Ford Motor Company’s plant in the Detroit area that is working overtime to assemble F-150 pickup trucks. “They’ve been ripping us off for decades, and it’s going to stop,” he said of Canada. Many F-150 engines are built just across the border in Windsor, Ontario. But Trump has threatened to double tariffs on such auto parts to 50 percent, along with other Canadian products. Canada has slapped its own counter-tariffs on US goods ranging between 15 and 50 percent, intensifying the trade war between the historically close allies.
© 2024 AFP
