US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday in Washington D.C. to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America" amid an escalating trade conflict with Canada, according to Al Jazeera and Reuters.
The large body of water, which sits on the border between the US state of New York and the Canadian province of Ontario, serves as a vital geographic and economic hub for both nations. Speaking at a news conference in the Oval Office of the White House, Trump announced that the name change would be effective immediately for US federal purposes. He told reporters that Canadian officials had treated the United States unfairly and described the move as a long-planned decision. The US Department of the Interior and the Board on Geographic Names have been instructed to finalize the process over the next thirty days.
This executive order arrives during a period of intense economic strain between the two neighboring countries. Last week, the Trump administration imposed a fifty percent tariff on nearly twenty billion dollars worth of Canadian goods. In response to the economic measures, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced plans to impose dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs on US imports starting on September 8.
The unilateral decision to rename the lake has drawn sharp criticism and outright rejection from Canadian leadership. Prime Minister Carney stated on the social media platform X that the original name is over four hundred years old, predating both the establishment of the United States and the Canadian Confederation. He emphasized that Canadians will always refer to the body of water as Lake Ontario. Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, echoed this sentiment, firmly stating that the name remains permanent for Canadians and the rest of the world.
Opposition to the renaming effort is also evident within the United States. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, confirmed that her state will not adopt the new name suggested by the White House. Derek Alderman, a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, told Al Jazeera that the name Ontario derives from an Indigenous Wendat word meaning "lake of shining waters." He characterized the executive order as an attempt to erase Indigenous history from the North American map.
There is no binding international authority that can mandate the global adoption of Trump`s new name for the shared lake. While organizations such as the International Hydrographic Bureau and the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names work to standardize geographic nomenclature, they do not enforce unilateral changes across international borders. The executive order mirrors a similar directive issued by Trump in January 2025, when he attempted to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Canadian officials have maintained that the latest mandate holds no authority beyond US federal agencies.
