The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 30, 2026


Liberals Embarrassed in "Lake America" Fight With Trump - Totally Unserious


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

178.36

Word count

3,966

Sentence count

101


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.400 Canada's liberal politicians are humiliating themselves fighting with President Donald Trump
00:00:06.120 over this whole Lake America thing. You know, that's what Canadians want. They don't want a
00:00:12.820 trade deal with the United States that will get us lower tariffs on steel and aluminum and autos
00:00:18.620 and preserve Canadian jobs. No, they want Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug
00:00:25.540 Ford fighting with Trump, who is just messing with them over the name Lake Ontario or Lake
00:00:32.520 America. Check out this video that Donald Trump posted yesterday on Truth Social. I've had to
00:00:38.900 mute the video because it's copyright music in the background, but you'll get the whole
00:00:42.740 like gist of it. It's a stupid AI video where you see Donald Trump here walking up to the shores
00:00:48.700 of Lake Ontario and replacing the Lake Ontario sign with Lake America. You know, honestly,
00:00:55.080 i'm not going to pretend this isn't kind of funny like if you don't think this is kind of funny you
00:00:59.360 don't have a sense of humor it's really dumb oh why you don't you don't like canada if you find
00:01:03.580 it funny i like canada fine guys i'm a canadian patriot two things can be true at once is this
00:01:10.120 really dumb garbage yes it's also really funny which is why doug ford and mark carney and other
00:01:17.900 liberal politicians look ridiculous and they are humiliating themselves right now freaking out
00:01:24.640 about this rather than actually trying to save Canadian jobs, rather than actually trying to
00:01:31.520 improve our economy, because this is fundamentally really what they care about. They care about the
00:01:37.340 Lake America fight. This is what actually gets them excited in politics, fighting Trump over
00:01:43.680 symbolic nonsense. So this is how Doug Ford responded. He spent who knows how many tax dollars
00:01:52.420 having consultants and marketing people put together a video and this billboard that says
00:01:58.480 Lake Ontario now and always check it out from his Twitter account I'm here on the shores of
00:02:05.320 beautiful Lake Ontario a crown jewel of our province and our country you may have heard
00:02:11.640 that President Trump is trying to rename this lake all because he doesn't like Ontario and
00:02:17.640 canada standing up for ourselves but let's be serious it has nothing to do with canada standing
00:02:23.140 up for ourselves now i want a good trade deal there were certain parts of the last trade deal
00:02:28.920 that mark carney walked away from that i did not like that i would have not signed on to
00:02:33.040 the concerning thing is that the problems with the trade deal 25 steel and aluminum tariffs it
00:02:39.080 could have been lower there's been other we don't have the full deal out there's been speculations
00:02:43.520 the tariff in aluminum rate would have been lower than 25 but from what is generally noted would
00:02:48.740 have been 25 auto tariffs would have been seven for most cars which is acceptable but medium and
00:02:54.500 heavy trucks would have maybe been 15 that's still too high but the problems that mark carney had
00:03:00.680 with the trade deal and why he walked away were just amorphous cultural issues or america saying
00:03:07.500 hey don't trade as much and integrate on security matters with communist china that is what actually
00:03:14.940 offended mark carney which makes me have like zero confidence in his ability to get a good trade deal
00:03:20.240 because what he thinks is a bad part is in fact the oak the acceptable part and what he thinks is
00:03:26.320 an acceptable part is actually the bad part but it has nothing to do trump's not doing the lake
00:03:31.820 america thing because he's tired of he doesn't like ontario and canada standing up for ourselves
00:03:37.920 it's to mess with doug ford because doug ford is sensitive and was throwing shots at him
00:03:42.780 personally yes long before president trump this lake was called lake ontario and long after
00:03:50.740 president trump is gone it will still be called lake ontario but just in case president trump
00:03:57.420 or anyone else forgets we've set up this sign to remind them it's lake ontario now and forever
00:04:04.940 okay it is it is like ontario now and forever like president trump signing something doesn't
00:04:11.880 actually change the name of it he's just messing with them he did this whole thing in the oval
00:04:16.740 office where they printed about a big picture of all the great lakes and he just crossed out
00:04:21.380 Lake Ontario and like added Lake America and his signature very bold style of writing and it's kind
00:04:27.540 of funny it's not changing anything even the Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico it's not the
00:04:32.740 Gulf of America yeah Google will put in brackets underneath Gulf of America because he said that
00:04:37.800 so some people will expect it but officially it's what every other country on the planet will
00:04:43.520 basically recognize something as being called or what relevant countries or relevant international
00:04:49.420 bodies or even national bodies call it because again really names are there so that to keep
00:04:54.960 things understandable uh so but how much money again did we spend on a giant billboard uh that
00:05:02.420 said lake ontario now and always why and of course it was bilingual too just in case we had some
00:05:08.860 french person coming by not realizing what was going on but isn't this a little bit embarrassing
00:05:15.460 This is what we spend our time on.
00:05:17.560 This is from CTV News covering it.
00:05:19.460 Two, one, go ahead.
00:05:22.200 Yeah!
00:05:23.540 Yeah!
00:05:25.420 Ontario Premier Doug Ford unveils a big...
00:05:28.220 By the way, yeah, Doug Ford unveiling something big is not surprising.
00:05:33.700 But you know what?
00:05:34.620 You know what?
00:05:35.500 Great paunch, Doug Ford.
00:05:36.840 Great paunch.
00:05:37.960 Thanks for showing up with your paunch.
00:05:39.500 I think that Donald Trump's definitely going to back off now because you showed up with your big paunch.
00:05:44.940 stretching out a big, stretching out your team canned soccer shirt.
00:05:51.280 Here's another video that contrasts Donald Trump messing with Doug Ford with the billboard unveiling.
00:05:58.200 Changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately to Lake America.
00:06:05.560 That's going to take place right now as I sign the order.
00:06:09.340 Do you have anything to say about it, Ben?
00:06:11.160 Yes, sir.
00:06:11.900 So this is a straightforward but important executive order to direct Secretary Burgum and the Department of the Interior to update the Geographic Names Information Service to reflect that the lake, once known as Lake Ontario, will, from the state forward, be known as Lake America.
00:06:28.440 This is a lake that has most of its volume in the United States.
00:06:31.880 The deepest parts of the lake sit in the United States territory.
00:06:34.800 So this will reflect.
00:06:36.760 And the thing is, I want to contrast the two stunts here.
00:06:39.500 This is obviously stunned by Donald Trump. He doesn't take what he's doing seriously here.
00:06:44.940 He put out an AI video and he did a little signing in the office with staff members who probably work in the next rooms over.
00:06:52.060 They brought a little bristle board with the map relabeled America.
00:06:57.600 Stuff that probably cost them in total a few hundred bucks or whatever to do.
00:07:02.680 But when it comes to Doug Ford, we probably spent, as taxpayers, I'm not in Ontario, but I'm saying as Canadian taxpayers, it's all coming out of one pool since Ontario does get a lot of federal transfers.
00:07:14.480 How much money did we spend doing this?
00:07:17.240 Hundreds of thousands, maybe if not a million dollars, because you could say that shouldn't cost a million dollars.
00:07:23.260 A Canadian provincial government will figure out how to make it more than a million dollars to hire all the consultants, do a focus group, have a marketing team, figure out the best, you know, exact font that they're going to put on the sign, and then bringing out the sign and paying the unionized labor to put it up and whatnot.
00:07:40.120 maybe they've done this elsewhere what did this actually accomplish because doug ford keeps doing
00:07:46.040 this in in and out game where he'll attack donald trump and then by the next day he will have like
00:07:52.960 said hey everything got a little heated let's be friends again i want to get to what mark carney
00:07:58.080 said about all this in a little bit his was frankly more embarrassing than uh than than what
00:08:04.220 doug ford did because he kind of like undermined the country in his own response but i want to
00:08:09.320 highlight this piece of news uh being posted about by kirk lubomov a couple days ago he says
00:08:15.880 donald trump just doubled america's oil reserves u.s entered an agreement with venezuela for 65
00:08:21.060 billion dollar billion of uh for 65 billion of barrels this will take a decade to hit full
00:08:27.760 production but you have to start somewhere and imports will keep increasing securing supply for
00:08:32.640 years. And why I talk about this is to highlight the seriousness that America puts into actually
00:08:40.920 finding other markets to replace Canada with compared to what Canada does to try and replace
00:08:46.860 the United States. Because America, if it starts importing cheap Venezuelan oil, they may not even
00:08:53.400 need to buy as much Alberta oil. So the fact that we've been dragging our feet for over a decade
00:08:59.520 in not building eastern or western pipelines is unforgivable and mark carney cannot come out of
00:09:06.040 the woodwork and say well i'm starting to build a western west coast pipeline yeah except under
00:09:11.300 justin trudeau you were advising against it and now you're saying yes but your plan might also
00:09:16.140 take up to 10 years to build a pipeline to a port area that doesn't have the capacity for it and the
00:09:21.760 port's going to have to be updated too america is getting big things done and i'm not just saying
00:09:27.180 they're getting big things done because they're bigger than us. They're getting substantial
00:09:30.300 things done. The thing is, Mark Carney, every time he goes around the world and signs a new
00:09:34.980 agreement, it doesn't result in anything. Because other than signaling to basically the elbows up
00:09:42.840 liberal base, these things aren't actually meant to, you know, there's no deliverables attached
00:09:47.500 to it. Mark Carney doesn't know actually how to deliver deliverables. His entire career has been
00:09:53.540 sitting on like you know the being the chair of Brookfield Asset Management or being at the Bank
00:09:57.760 of England or the Bank of Cannes or Goldman Sachs he's never built anything he just knows how to
00:10:03.020 effectively network move money around and that's it and when in terms of like you know when it's
00:10:09.640 at Brookfield he's really good at putting his mouth underneath a subsidy pipe that is what
00:10:14.980 Brookfield always lived off of government subsidies government grants and getting an inside lane for
00:10:21.520 a government contract or some other investment idea that heavily relies on the government
00:10:26.840 guaranteeing profitability, like in the green energy markets back when Justin Trudeau was
00:10:31.860 prime minister, although it is still continuing under Mark Carney.
00:10:36.460 But now I want to jump over to what Mark Carney said about the whole Lake Ontario thing.
00:10:42.100 Here we go.
00:10:43.240 Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, says the name Lake Ontario comes from the
00:10:47.920 Wendat word, Ontario, which apparently means, or appropriately means, the lake is beautiful,
00:10:55.540 the lake is big. The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada
00:11:01.560 and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. We know that America is
00:11:05.860 changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments,
00:11:09.940 their homonyms. Canada also knows that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario, then,
00:11:15.460 now and always and always doing this kind of like pre-colonial signaling oh it's actually
00:11:21.700 it's not good because it's a canadian word it's not good because it's a it's a name canada has
00:11:26.740 chosen uh it's a good because it's it's a first nations word it's a wendat word that's what makes
00:11:33.140 it valuable that i love the subtle baking in of everything that's good about canada is not actually
00:11:40.160 canadian it has nothing to do with the deliberate choices of canadian institutions to build up the
00:11:46.320 country and individual canadian entrepreneurs and you know and heroes you know forging this country
00:11:53.120 out of out of like the the wilderness it's always whenever it comes to a liberal always comes back
00:11:59.040 to it was you know an indigenous person had done it at their ergo it's good you should just say
00:12:06.800 Canadians call it Lake Ontario and thus it will always be Lake Ontario in Canada and the rest of
00:12:12.620 the world. Trump can do what he wants, but it doesn't really matter. I'm going to give, I want
00:12:16.500 to jump over to what Peter Pauly have said about this, because I know some people are saying he
00:12:20.740 shouldn't have said anything. Don't engage in the debate at all. Guys, it's the reality of politics.
00:12:25.280 You do have to say something because there are sensitive voters out there, even many who vote
00:12:29.400 conservative, who are mad at Donald Trump for the Lake America thing. They think it's offensive.
00:12:36.800 they grind their gears in some way. So Polyev had to say something. And I think what he actually
00:12:42.260 said was the correct response. Polyev here said, Lake Ontario is and always will be Lake Ontario,
00:12:49.880 and no executive order will change that. It belongs to President Trump to, it doesn't belong
00:12:54.360 to President Trump to rename on a whim. Our two countries have real issues that impact our people.
00:13:00.600 Instead of responding to stunts and distractions, Canadians must stay focused on what we can
00:13:05.000 control making our economy strong and affordable at home and using our leverage to fight tariff
00:13:09.820 for to fight tariffs abroad absolutely again some people can say uh it's playing into the
00:13:17.260 the mainstream media game in canada of having to respond to the lake ontario thing sure sometimes
00:13:23.460 yes it is a bit of a legacy media game where they're trying to see who's going to be patriotic
00:13:28.240 and stand up to like america thing just because it's a political game doesn't mean you sometimes
00:13:33.180 don't have to play you see doesn't mean that sometimes you don't have to play it you do have
00:13:37.860 to play into the game sometimes and i think that that was better than mark carney saying it was
00:13:43.460 from an old when that word does donald trump not know that and doug ford going out there with his
00:13:48.480 paunch and and unveiling a billboard saying lake ontario now and always it's like wow wow i can
00:13:55.060 feel the trade agreement getting getting close i can it's at my it's at our fingertips now this
00:14:00.000 trade agreement because we've stood up to donald trump and called him like an idiot or whatever
00:14:06.780 a loser like doug ford did and then walked it back and whatever he's doing now it's all just
00:14:12.100 so embarrassing that this is stuff that apparently we think is i don't know necessary to talk about
00:14:20.260 like deeply important but that's really it they don't think it's important for can to get a trade
00:14:26.860 deal but they do think it's important to oppose Donald Trump's AI memes that took him like maybe
00:14:33.240 10 seconds to put out we have wasted so much time on something that literally does not matter and
00:14:40.700 so many liberal politicians all over Canada and Doug Ford is a liberal politician just because
00:14:45.960 he's the progressive conservative premier of Ontario doesn't mean that PC policies are not
00:14:51.660 very, very liberal. But every liberal politician across Canada had to sound off about this.
00:14:57.640 And then you have people like Danielle Smith getting attacked because she's actually fairly
00:15:02.540 serious about the trade situation and is telling people that, sorry, you can't just, you know,
00:15:09.300 tariff or put export taxes on oil and gas leaving the country. It literally is not how it works. But
00:15:16.120 like I showed in that cartoon yesterday from somebody who was depicting America and Canada
00:15:21.600 fighting as some schoolyard drama and Canada just needs to go embrace its other friends around the
00:15:26.620 world and everything's going to be okay you actually need to deal with the world as it is
00:15:31.200 which Mark Carney was apparently a fan of before remember all of his uh speeches a year ago were
00:15:38.220 about how we need to be clear-eyed about the world we need to deal with the world as it is not as we
00:15:43.620 wish it to be but he always deals with the world as he wishes it to be he does the whole high school
00:15:49.720 drama thing as if really canda wins at the end of the day if we if we you know you know put our chin
00:15:54.600 up and we tell america no if we tell america it's in fact it's lake ontario it's not lake america
00:16:00.900 this will somehow have the hollywood movie moment at the end where we get a trade deal and our
00:16:06.620 economy booms or whatever and a bunch of liberals are saying oh my goodness conservatives were wrong
00:16:11.280 about Canada's economy retracting. We had 0.8% growth in the second quarter of 2026, which yes,
00:16:18.640 if that was annualized and you had 0.8 every quarter, you'd have 3.3% growth in 2026, which
00:16:24.540 would be very, very good. But that's only because of oil and gas prices being higher for the second
00:16:30.200 quarter. It's not because we've actually grown in any substantial way. We had very high oil and gas
00:16:36.520 prices in that quarter. And as they are going to go down, we are going to have our GDP start either
00:16:42.420 declining or flatlining once again. But here is Alberta Premier Daniel Smith throwing a cold
00:16:48.760 bucket of water at the Liberals and explaining that you can't just put an export tax on oil and
00:16:55.880 gas going into the United States from Alberta because it comes back into Canada through the
00:17:01.220 United States. Disastrous. Can you explain the main concern you've got about the idea of even
00:17:07.240 using energy as a weapon here? Line five goes through Wisconsin and Michigan before it makes
00:17:12.520 its way to Sarnia. 50% of the oil at Sarnia goes into Ontario refineries and then about two-thirds
00:17:19.820 of the oil that Quebec needs also comes by way of that route through line nine. Ontario Quebec used
00:17:25.520 to get most of their natural gas from Alberta about 10 years ago. They switched to be getting
00:17:30.920 it from the United States. Now two-thirds of the natural gas going into Ontario and Quebec comes
00:17:36.140 from the United States. And so those would be the reasons is that we've got to think of what
00:17:40.400 the counterpunch might look like. And if we could live with that, we can't. We can't shut down the
00:17:44.820 Toronto Pearson Airport because they can't get aviation fuel. We can't shut down the Ontario
00:17:50.000 and Quebec economies because they can't get gasoline and diesel. That doesn't make sense.
00:17:54.120 So we should be talking about the things that we can do to support each other. And that's not one
00:17:58.180 So what I learned from this is that premiers like Doug Ford and someone like Prime Minister Mark Carney and people like David Eby and Wabkanu, when they try and tell Saskatchewan and Alberta, just cut off oil and gas shipments to the United States, put a big export tax on it, really make them feel the pain.
00:18:17.180 they don't know what they're talking about or they're lying they're lying by being super elbows
00:18:24.380 up and saying we should go nuclear on the u.s put a 75 percent tariff on all oil and gas going into
00:18:30.240 the united states and they know that their oil and gas comes up from the united states but they also
00:18:35.140 know danielle smith isn't stupid enough to do it so they get to engage in the dumb rhetoric that
00:18:40.700 makes them popular with the elbows up crowd knowing that danielle smith is going to be the bad guy
00:18:46.020 she's going to be the bad parent and enter the room saying hey guys we can't eat ice cream for
00:18:51.440 breakfast lunch and dinner in fact we need to be realistic and do things that are going to be good
00:18:57.100 for us she's like having to be everyone's like she's like a mother in a household with an
00:19:01.700 extremely irresponsible father who's like still mentally like 10 years old and doesn't actually
00:19:06.720 think his decisions ahead of time it's like like oh my goodness Doug Ford and Mark Carney and some
00:19:12.880 these other premiers are like homer simpson and we have basically danielle smith being a more
00:19:19.280 intelligent marge trying to hold them back from destroying the entire family here you know let's
00:19:25.360 just let's just cut off oil and gas shipments the united states let's just shut down our entire
00:19:30.020 economy that would make the u.s mad let's start fires on our side of the border the smoke that
00:19:35.860 goes down to the united states should truly annoy them it's like okay okay uh do we never think
00:19:42.420 about how things affect us this is the whole problem with the trade war carney thinks he's
00:19:47.500 brave and the media also do because he walked away from a bad deal why is the deal bad dummy
00:19:54.700 he's had a year and a half do we never think about the fact that he's failed to get anything
00:19:59.780 in the ballpark of good for a year and a half because he failed to actually be at the table
00:20:04.260 negotiating the deal and or even he hasn't even really allowed his own team to negotiate a proper
00:20:10.020 deal he keeps tying their arms behind their backs because he values supply management he values
00:20:16.660 c11 and c18 those two cultural and media censorship policies he values the trade agreement
00:20:23.680 with china that allows them to dump evs in our country evs created off of stolen technology and
00:20:30.240 designs from the west he's more caring about preserving those things than getting aluminum
00:20:37.560 steel tariffs from 25%, maybe down to 10. Something acceptable for Canadians, maybe down to 12.
00:20:44.300 Something that we could make up with a corporate tax cut or some tax break for the affected
00:20:48.760 companies. Rather than trying to get the auto tariffs on heavy trucks lower, we are instead
00:20:54.260 going to try and, I don't know, fight for Netflix to have French CBC content at the top of the list.
00:21:04.580 these are the things that apparently matter to our politicians more exemplified perfectly by their
00:21:11.420 focus on lake america and not a good deal for canada anyways so with all that being said thank
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