By Emel Akan
& Omid Ghoreishi
Contributing Writers
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to officially rename Lake Ontario as Lake America, effective immediately.
“Canada has been ripping us off for a long time on trade, very sadly,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office after signing the order. “Even the military, you know, we defend Canada for nothing. We don’t get anything.”
He added that Canada wants to be treated like a state, “but they’re not a state.”
The U.S. Department of the Interior will update the Geographic Names Information System to reflect the new name.
“Make the Great Lakes Great Again!” wrote U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum after issuing an order to his department to implement the change.
The U.S. president issued the executive order as tensions between the two countries continue to escalate over tariffs and trade.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement on Thursday that the lake’s historic name is Lake Ontario and that it will remain the same “then, now and always.”
He said the lake was named after the Wendat word Ontari’io which means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.”
“The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America,” he said. “We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.”
Trump first suggested the idea of renaming the lake on Tuesday after Ontario Premier Doug Ford criticized him with insults and profane language over the new U.S. tariffs on Canada on Monday. Trump subsequently issued statements of his own with insults directed at Ford.
When asked about the issue, Ford said on Tuesday that it’s best the two sides tone down the rhetoric, adding that things “got a little personal yesterday between the president and myself.”
This is not the first time Trump has renamed a body of water. In January 2025, on his first day in office, he issued an executive order for all U.S. agencies to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
“We have a gulf, and we have a lake — now all we need is an ocean,” Trump said on Thursday. “Maybe we‘ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”
Negotiations between Canada and the United States broke down on Aug. 21, leading to new 50% U.S. tariffs on nearly $20 billion of Canadian products taking effect on Saturday.
Trump also announced on Monday his plan to impose new 50% tariffs on all Canadian vehicles and auto parts beginning in 2027, after Canada announced its intention to impose dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs against the United States.
“We love the people of Canada. I don’t think their representatives do an appropriate job,” Trump said.
In his speech announcing his government’s plan to impose retaliatory tariffs on the United States, Carney said on Saturday that Canada had been working “in good faith” with the United States toward a trade deal, but that the deal Washington offered was unacceptable to his government, so he instructed his team to walk away on Aug. 21.
“Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America,” Carney said.
Canada’s counter-tariffs come into effect on Sept. 8.
Matthew Horwood contributed to this report.
