Ontario Premier Doug Ford answered President Donald Trump’s “Lake America” decree Saturday with a billboard-sized message on the Canadian shoreline — “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” — as Canadian leaders met the move with ridicule rather than outrage.
Wearing a Team Canada soccer jersey, Ford unveiled the sign near Grimsby, Ontario, and posed for photographs. The 24-by-12-foot (7.3-by-3.6 meter) sign stands on 6-foot (1.8-meter) legs, putting its top about 18 feet (5.5 meters) above the ground — roughly two stories high. The message is repeated in French, one
The display followed Trump’s executive order directing U.S. federal agencies to call Lake Ontario “Lake America.” After months of tariffs, threats to make Canada the 51st U.S. state and personal attacks on its leaders, the reaction in Canada has mixed defiance with mockery.
Doug Ford is exactly the same personality type as Trump, and given the same opportunities as Trump had would probably end up in exactly the same place. He is a dishonest, opportunistic, populist, malignant narcissist. He will say and do whatever he thinks will get him the support he needs to accomplish his deeply corrupt personal goals, which have nothing to do with helping the people of his province or country and everything to do with securing his own future and the people he considers to be others like him. And you might be tempted to apathetically respond “all politicians are like that” and that may even be objectively true to some degree at this time, but that is reductive and normalizing bad behavior is not a valid solution to anything unless you want to invite even more bad behavior. Holding people like this accountable is the only cure for it. Shaping the public discourse around them is an important and probably fundamental part of that, and we cannot do it alone.