Canada and US Exchange Actions Over Lake Ontario Naming Amid Trade Dispute
Lake America, Lake Ontario, and the Arms Behind the Joke
When leaders fight over the name of a lake while levying 50% tariffs, the wise observer watches not the swagger but the steel, the coalitions, and the hatred these spectacles may sow.
A president dances to a song and kicks over a sign; a government answers with a bigger sign and a slogan, “Lake Ontario. Now and Always.” On its surface, it is ridiculous: a quarrel over the administrative renaming of a lake. But the effectual truth, which I always prefer to the imagined one, is more serious. Behind this theatre stands a 50% tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa. The lake is only the stage curtain. The real drama is a trade war, where each side tests how far it can wound the other’s interests without provoking a blow that endangers its own survival.
When I wrote in *The Prince*, in the translation of W. K. Marriott, that men judge “more by the eyes than by the hands,” I described exactly this sort of struggle. The American president posts a video: he tears down an avatar of the Canadian sign, plants “Lake America,” and dances to music. These gestures cost him nothing in treasure yet buy him attention, identity, talk. The Canadian government answers not with words alone but with a giant physical sign by the water, an image of permanence against a perceived insult. Each understands that in a commercial republic, reputation is an asset like gold.
Still, reputation is not built from jokes alone; it rests on arms. In my time, arms meant infantry and cavalry; in yours, they are tariffs, regulations, alliances, and the power to endure losses longer than a rival. The United States throws down a 50% tariff on Canadian steel. This is a cannon shot, not a firework. Ottawa replies with its own tariffs. Here I see both sides obeying a harsh rule of statecraft: a leader must first maintain the state, and where he thinks his industry or his dignity is attacked, he is compelled to strike, not because sermons say so but because constituencies and interests demand it. The lake signs are banners nailed to artillery.
Those who laugh at the spectacle miss its prudence. To impose heavy tariffs without a narrative of national assertion would be to inflict pain without honor, and so to invite hatred at home. By changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” the president wraps an economic measure in a language the people can feel; he translates a line in a customs code into a visible triumph over a neighbor. Canada, likewise, cannot answer a symbolic diminishment of its own lake with statistics alone; it raises a colossal sign and declares “Now and Always,” signaling to its people that sovereignty is not for sale with a discount on steel.
The danger is that what begins as calculated theatre hardens into real hatred. In *The Prince* I argued that a ruler must avoid being hated even more than he must seek to be loved, for hatred breeds conspiracies that no prudence can entirely master. A tariff hurts a pocket; an insult to name and honor hurts the soul. When trade disputes are framed as battles over national existence, every concession looks like betrayal, and the very tools required to end the quarrel become politically poisonous. What was begun to maintain the state can, if mismanaged, corrode the civic affection that truly maintains it.
Yet I would not praise the middle course. Between bold action and timidity, the latter is far more ruinous. Half-measures in a trade war—weak tariffs, apologetic rhetoric, hesitation in reply—teach rivals you lack stomach and teach your own people you lack virtù. Here, at least, both actors choose decisiveness: strong tariffs, equally clear retaliation, vivid symbols. This resembles what I described about fortune as a river: she floods where there are no dykes. Leaders who act boldly, early, and visibly raise dykes in the minds of their citizens and the calculations of their adversaries. To stand still is to drown.
The contest now turns on endurance and adaptation. Which side has arms of its own—economic strength, public support, institutional flexibility—and which depends on auxiliaries who may desert at the first real cost? Which can shift from the lion to the fox, from roaring about “Lake America” or “Now and Always” to quietly cutting a deal that preserves face while lowering the temperature? Republics, as I argued in the *Discourses on Livy* (in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation), are often wiser and more constant than princes; if the peoples of both countries tire of paying for this quarrel, they will push their rulers toward some accommodation. Until then, remember: the lake is a mirror in which each side studies its power, but the true depth lies in the steel beneath the waterline.
From the works cited
- The Prince — The economy of violence and the feared/loved calculus: better feared than loved if one must choose, but never hated — fear rests on the prince's will, love on the fickle will of others.
- The Prince — Arms of one's own versus mercenaries and auxiliaries: power borrowed is power owed, and it will be collected at the worst moment.
- The Prince — Occasione: the new prince needs the matter (a crisis, a vacuum) and the virtù to shape it — opportunity without capacity is a tragedy, capacity without opportunity a biography nobody writes.