Ford: Trump renaming Lake Ontario is 'something out of "Saturday Night Live"'

Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Sunday said that President Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America" resembled "something out of 'Saturday Night Live.'"

Ford slammed Trump's trade war with Canada that placed a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods in an interview with ABC News's "This Week" host Martha Raddatz.

"I just don't see the purpose. It's absolutely backwards," he said. "It was like something out of 'Saturday Night Live' when he signed a document saying 'change to Lake America.' No one's going to call it Lake America. It's been Lake Ontario for hundreds of years. It's going to continue to be Lake Ontario."

Ford called the tariffs and renaming "so, so disappointing, because I love the U.S. I love the American people. Canadians love the American people."

"We differentiate between a great American people and the president," he added.

Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to formally rename the Great Lake "effective immediately." The president said that all "necessary papers, documents, everything else" were "filed."

Trump had previously signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America." The name change, appearing on Google Maps, led Mexico to file a lawsuit last year.

Lake Ontario appears on Google Maps named as Lake America, following Trump's order.

"If you think about it, we have a gulf, now we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean," Trump quipped while signing the executive order Thursday. "Maybe we'll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we'll change them both."

The Seneca Nation - one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy - on Friday called on Trump to rescind the order.

The nation's president, J. Conrad Seneca, said the renaming violated the terms of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, signed by leaders of the confederacy and President George Washington, which laid out the Seneca's Nation's boundaries as "beginning on Lake Ontario."

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney dismissed the renaming, pointing to the Wedat Nation's word to describe the lake, Ontari'io, "which, appropriately, means 'the lake is beautiful, the lake is big."

"We know that America is changing," Carney wrote on social media. "Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms. Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario - then, now and always."

Carney previously announced retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. beginning on Sept. 8. Seafood and fish products were exempt, but not copper wire, wood charcoal, steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics.

Though some lawmakers have criticized the tariffs, Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) said the tariffs "won't go well" for Canada.

"If Canada thinks they're better off without our goods, I wish them good luck," Golden told the Portland Press Herald on Tuesday. "I suspect in the long run, it won't go well for them."