Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his regular weekly segment, Liedtke’s Got a Take!
Jon Liedtke analyzes Donald Trump’s recent proposal to unilaterally rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America”, characterizing it as retaliatory trolling directed at Ontario Premier Doug Ford. He also explores micro-targeted Canadian tariffs and reaffirms the lake’s shared history and established international sovereignty.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Full Transcript
Gene Valaitis: It’s Jhn Liedtke with his fantastic “Liedtke’s Got a Take.” Good morning, Jonny!
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene!
Gene Valaitis: Well, you know, yesterday was the… as I said, the 25th of August, but for anybody in talk radio, it was really the 25th of December. It was like Christmas with everything going on. Now, I know you saw the post from Trump saying he is giving, and I quote, “serious consideration,” unquote, to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America because he doesn’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario and Doug Ford anymore. Now, is this a real policy move, or are we just watching high-stakes cartography trolling on social media?
Jon Liedtke: He is the troll-in-chief! He’s a once-in-a-generation troll. This is reality TV that we all get to watch on our news feeds. But here’s the thing: I thought Republicans didn’t like cancel culture! But here we are watching a US president trying to cancel a 10,000-year-old body of water on his own social media site because our premier gave him a piece of his mind on our Canadian airwaves. It’s wild! You can’t tweet away an international watershed. So yeah, I mean, it’s high-stakes cartography trolling, as you said, pure and simple. This guy, he wants headlines, he wants the media to obsess over it, because he wants to distract from the actual economic issues that he has going on right now—primarily, you know, gas prices are still high, there’s still inflation, the Strait of Hormuz isn’t fully open, there’s a war going on, of course, with Iran that caused that. I mean, the situation’s not great. So geographic reality doesn’t care about his social media feed.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Well, he explicitly tied this whole thing to not doing business with us right after Doug Ford told him on my friend Bill’s show up in Ottawa to kiss his ass, and it went crazy viral. But is there… is there something deeper going on here? I always wonder about this. Is this just a personal tit-for-tat between Ford and Trump, or is Ontario genuinely being singled out because of this little personal sore spot?
Jon Liedtke: Oh, I think it’s 100% personal. Look at the pattern: Trump doesn’t like to be challenged, he doesn’t like to be personally insulted, and he certainly doesn’t separate public policy from his personal brand. And when he gets hit, we know from him, self-professedly, that he hits back harder. But it’s… it’s more than that. Where has his brand taken some of the most embarrassing public beatings? In Canada! In British Columbia and in Ontario, where Canadian property owners literally paid millions of dollars to rip his gold letters off of now-former Trump hotels, removing the Trump brand from global international skylines for him. So his ego is bruised! He’s hurt, Gene. It’s sad. So when Doug Ford tells him where to stick it, or, you know, where to kiss it, excuse me, Trump responds by trying to rebrand a 7,000-square-mile lake. This is childhood playground dynamics mixed with multi-billion-dollar supply chains.
Gene Valaitis: Well, you know what happens when people have their feelings hurt, and we don’t disagree on this show. So let me just stop to give Trump… you know what? Aw, muffin! He needs an “aw, muffin.” Aw, muffin! But, you know, we’ve seen this movie before though, Jon. From… I remember when he was drawing on that weather map with a Sharpie to say that the storm went up to Alabama when it never did. And then declaring the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America. So how much of this is actual international policy? How much of it is just feeding the media circus? Hey, but listen though! In the United States, Google Maps has gone along with the Gulf of America thing.
Jon Liedtke: Well, you know, countries get to decide what they call things within their own borders. And, you know, corporations that have, you know, mapping, for example, or other organizations, have to adhere to it if they want to continue to operate within those boundaries. So it’s Sharpiegate 2.0, but with a Great Lake instead of a hurricane. It’s… it’s hilarious. It’s the same mental framework: he creates the narrative, he projects the dominance, and then he forces his cabinet and his federal agencies to validate it on the maps to make him feel better. But here’s the kicker: just like he couldn’t Sharpie a hurricane into Alabama, he can’t tweet away maritime law and internationally agreed-upon names. Internal maps in the US now might say “Lake America” if that actually happens, but Canada, the UN, and every international cartographer on Earth is going to keep printing “Lake Ontario.” It’s just like how Rogers keeps trying to get us to call it anything other than the Skydome. Not gonna happen!
Gene Valaitis: Not ever in my life! Now, listen… I’m a… I’m a very, very lucky guy. I happen to live one block away from Lake Ontario, and I can be on the beach in like a minute and a half. But legally speaking, can the White House actually force Canada, or for that matter, the rest of the world, to start calling Lake Ontario “Lake America”? And where does Lake Ontario come from anyway? I know, but I think many don’t.
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, you know, he can’t force a single soul outside of the federal government or a corporation that wants to continue to operate in good standing with the US to change the name to Lake America. Under international maritime law, Lake Ontario is a shared, transboundary body of water. To legally change its name globally, both Ottawa and Washington would have to formally sign a bilateral treaty amendment—and good luck getting us to sign off on that during a trade war! But yeah, let’s talk about the history, though. The name comes from Iroquois and Huron words, which mean both “beautiful lake” or “great lake,” respectively. Indigenous nations cared for this watershed centuries before the United States or Canada existed. So the sheer arrogance of trying to unilaterally overwrite ancient Indigenous etymology over a tariff spat is just mind-bogglingly out of touch.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Well, hey, Lake Ontario has a great history. In the War of 1812, it was a major battleground. So how was the lake actually used during that war?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, I mean, the history of the Great Lakes is incredible, Lake Ontario specifically, when it comes to this. It was the central supply highway of the entire War of 1812 because, you know, back then, there weren’t paved highways through the wilderness. So whoever controlled the lakes, Lake Ontario specifically, controlled the war, because you couldn’t move heavy artillery, or troops, or winter supplies through mud or forest like that. So it sparked an insane, high-stakes shipbuilding arms race. And then when the war ended in effectively a stalemate on both sides—I mean, that’s the history that I was taught in high school was, “didn’t really need to happen”—both sides realized that war on the lakes was financial suicide, and it led directly to an agreement to demilitarize the lakes. And they were disarmed, fleets were decommissioned, and it created the longest undefended border in human history. That’s the legacy on this water, on Lake Ontario, not social media tantrums or name changes.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Okay, so yesterday morning, the Prime Minister released the counter-tariffs on US goods being tariffed coming into Canada. They include—I don’t know where they got this one from—Goldfish, pickled gherkins, also cheese curds, which will make the price of poutine skyrocket in Canada! Where… where do they come up with a list like this?
Jon Liedtke: It does sound like absurdity on the surface, but, you know, when you actually open up that tariff schedule, there were a few other things that really made me laugh. You know, live eels, frozen octopus, pop-up toasters, fingernail clippers, coin-operated video games… playing cards! But the thing is, civil servants aren’t picking items at random with a blindfold on while walking through a grocery store. This is micro-targeted geopolitics. They cross-reference US manufacturing maps with upcoming congressional and Senate swing districts to inflict maximum political pain on US lawmakers with minimal damage to Canadian consumers—is the ideal. So hitting paper products targets Wisconsin mills; non-Coca-Cola candy, for example, targets Illinois; tropical aquarium fish hits Florida… all of that right in the electoral gut. I mean, this is surgical warfare wrapped up in a jar of gherkins—which is, by the way, Michigan, Florida, and North Carolina-manufactured.
Gene Valaitis: I love those pickles! Hey, final question: so how does this play out for people living right on border places like Windsor-Detroit and here, Niagara-New York State? What’s… what’s the bottom line when all the dust and poutine settle?
Jon Liedtke: For border communities in Windsor and Niagara, trade disputes, of course as you know, they’re not abstract, academic debates. They’re hitting us right in our pocketbooks, in our guts. In Windsor, auto parts cross the Detroit River up to seven times before a car rolls off the line. That’s a lot of tariffs there back and forth. Adding baseline or retaliatory tariffs to precision tooling or electronics adds real friction cost to local suppliers here. I mean, and up there in Niagara, I mean, if you’re shifting cross-border retail and you’re hitting tourism and you’re slamming agricultural inputs, that’s going to be hurting as well. So the bottom line is, as we know, true national sovereignty, it’s not press releases, it’s not bumper stickers or social media posts. We fought on Lake Ontario in 1812, we demilitarized it about five years later, we turned the waters into symbols of international cooperation and trade and friendship for now over two centuries. Our alliance is forged in shared sacrifice, not real estate transactions. So I’ll just leave it at this: it’s Lake Ontario yesterday, it’s Lake Ontario today, and quite frankly, it’ll be Lake Ontario tomorrow, Trump be damned!
Gene Valaitis: Long live Lake Ontario!
Jon Liedtke: Absolutely.
Gene Valaitis: Great take this morning. We’ll see you tomorrow.
Jon Liedtke: Cheers, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: There he goes, Jon Liedtke! Liedtke’s Got a Take.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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