Google’s change of Lake Ontario to Lake America is symbolic of a deeper problem, writes James McLeod.
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump renamed Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” By this weekend, Google Maps had already started displaying “Lake America.”
The best thing that can be said about the Trump administration is that their brazenness is doing Canada a favour.
First, Trump and his enablers tried to attack French cultural protections, and Canada’s ability to pursue our own trade deals. Now, in throwing this Lake Ontario tantrum, Trump is illustrating how much of our digital infrastructure and our daily lives ultimately depend on American companies — and regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, it is a situation that cannot stand.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has been abundantly clear that he sees the current trade war as a fundamental inflection point in the relationship between Canada and the United States.
“The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operation, is over,” Carney said way back in March of 2025.
This isn’t a little spat, and it isn’t something we’re going to conclusively solve any time soon. The truth is that this is an ongoing negotiation for the future terms of trade that will define our future economic relationship for decades to come.
So, if this is the fight for the 21st century terms of trade, why isn’t Carney talking about the digital economy, the very thing that will define the future?
Aluminum and automotive manufacturing are important, but digital platforms, artificial intelligence and quantum computing are already a bigger part of the economy, and growing faster.
In cloud services, three American companies dominate the Canadian market — Amazon, Microsoft and Google. In smartphones, Apple and Google are the only game in town. Google and Meta dominate online advertising. Amazon dominates e-commerce.
Each of these companies is worth well over 1 trillion (U.S.). And each of these companies are responsible for digital infrastructure that most of us use every day. The “Lake America” fiasco is an illustration of just how much cultural clout and domination the United States can bring to bear over the digital world, if they choose to do so.
By comparison, Canada’s largest technology company, Shopify, is a fraction of the size — just shy of $200 billion (U.S.).
One big reason for this disparity is because the American government uses policy to create structural advantages for their homegrown economic champions.
Just look at the provisions Canada agreed to back in 2018 in the digital chapter of CUSMA.
Under CUSMA we cannot require data residency on Canadian soil, with a few limited exceptions. CUSMA also extended the controversial Section 230 liability shield in American law, which prevents platforms from being legally responsible for the user generated content they post.
The agreement also made it impossible for Canada to compel companies to hand over source code and algorithms, which makes it far more difficult for governments to understand and regulate how digital platforms operate.
Yet, despite the centrality of these platforms and technologies to the modern economy, in the most recent round of trade negotiations, Canada’s main position on digital trade is that we’re willing to give up digital things in order to protect other areas.
We rescinded the digital services tax in 2025 just to get the Americans to come back to the negotiating table. We paused the Canadian content levy under the Online Streaming Act, after the U.S. listed it as a trade irritant. We also heard reports that Carney was ready to get rid of the Online News Act to get a deal, before Canada ultimately walked away from the table.
The worst case scenario for Canada is that we spend the next few months trading blows, painfully renegotiating the terms of trade in autos, steel, dairy and fish, but end up locking in American Big Tech’s structural advantage.
If Trump is ready to ignore CUSMA and impose unilateral tariffs on us, then maybe we should respond by announcing that the CUSMA digital chapter no longer binds us, and it’s time to start seriously talking about how we regulate Big Tech.
This goes beyond economic considerations, and cuts to the heart of our sovereignty. Governance is the foundation of digital sovereignty, and in the past decades, we have traded away too much governance power in exchange for market access to the United States.
Today we might be rolling our eyes at Trump’s latest outburst or at an AI video of gun-toting geese as part of this stupid Lake America/Lake Ontario stunt. But if we don’t assert our governance, Canada will not be able to assert our hate speech laws, our privacy laws or our consumer protection laws online.
That’s because Google and other big tech companies have made clear that they will acquiesce to American government requests, but they will push back forcefully when the Canadian government tries to set its own rules.
If Carney is right and this trade war really is a generational reassessment of Canada’s economic and geopolitical relationship with the United States, it is essential that digital trade and regulation is part of that conversation.
