Christopher Cross apologized to Canadians at Toronto’s RBC Amphitheatre Sunday night, the venue on the banks of recently ballyhooed Lake Ontario, calling President Trump “an asshole” and urging the crowd to not “give up on us.”
The “Sailing” singer didn’t have to get into any detail. Trump recently signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” imposed a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion of Canadian goods after the collapse of trade negotiations, called Canadian officials “nasty people,” and Canada “one of the worst countries in the world to deal with.”
Cross didn’t mention the lake-naming — or that the venue hosting the night‘s headliners, Toto, butts the actual Lake Ontario — but the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, best known for yacht rock classics like “Sailing,” “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” and “Ride Like the Wind,” made his feelings abundantly clear.
At the concert, Cross opened with his 2011 song “Dreamers,” which included a snippet of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “It’s a recording from something quite famous in our country, but you may not know what it was, but it was a gentleman named Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking about civil rights,” Cross said from the stage. The audience responded in kind. “It represents a very dark time in my country, which is happening again.”
Each line he spoke was met with increasingly louder cheers. Cross continued: “I want to tell you that we love your country and appreciate your country very much. … I’m just very sorry and embarrassed that we have an asshole for a president. But don’t give up on us. We have an election coming up, and we’re going to do our best to fix it. … And then we’ll be buying all your shit again, and you’ll be buying all our shit again. [cheers] We can be victims of corporate greed together.“ (Several Canadian provinces and territories have banned the sale of U.S. liquor in response to American tariffs.)
“Alright, enough of my preaching here,” Cross said. “I’m sure you’ll be reading in the paper where I’ve been ejected from the country, but that’s okay. I wanted to say what I had to say.”
Watch his comments in full below:
Trump‘s war of words with America‘s neighbor to the north has been a source of much tension between the two nations, with Trump belittling Canada and suggesting it become the 51st state. As he approaches the two-year mark of his second term, he has been ramping up the rhetoric. On Saturday, he posted a bizarre AI-created video of himself as a Canada goose with an army of geese carrying machine guns set to the “Hawaii Five-O” theme song. At the end, the flock fires into the Toronto skyline. The caption read: “Lake America — Protected by Donald Ducks.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded with a social media post tracing the history of the name Lake Ontario to the Wendat word Ontari’io, stating its origin is “more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.” He added, “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”
Cross is wrapping a 32-date North American tour with Toto. His 1980 hit, ”Ride Like the Wind,“ was featured prominently in the latest season of HBO‘s Euphoria.
