President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.”
The move comes amid the president’s repeated threats and taunts that he would do so amid his escalating trade war with Canada.
“This is official, effective immediately,” Trump said after signing the order in the Oval Office.
The president said he’d “filed all the necessary papers, documents, everything else” for the name change.
“We notified all of the various people that we have to notify. So we’ve done everything that you have to do, and this is official, effective immediately,” he said.
The order says that with “the deepest parts of the Lake’s waters lying within United States territory, the United States claims most of the Lake’s volume,” and that the “Lake has long been an integral asset to American exploration, settlement, commerce, and defense.”
Asked what message he was trying to send Canada by renaming the Great Lake, Trump said, “No message. As you know, Canada has been ripping us off for a long time on trade.”
“They don’t pay for anything, and they want to be treated like a state, but they’re not a state,” Trump said.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney noted on X a short time after Trump’s action that the name predates Canada — and the U.S.
“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, 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 wrote.
“We know that America is changing. 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,” he wrote.
Lake Ontario has been called Lake Ontario since at least the 1600s, and it is the inspiration of the name for Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, which is home to Ottawa and Toronto.
Trump made a similar move last year to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The Interior Department, Google and Apple complied with that directive, while the rest of the world largely has not.
Trump suggested Thursday other larger renamings could follow.
“So, the lake change, Lake of America, was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Actually, as you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico. We changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America. So, if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake,” he said. “Now, all we need is an ocean. So, maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”
Canadian maritime attorney Marc Isaacs told NBC News this week that a U.S. move on a name change of Lake Ontario wouldn’t affect other countries, including Canada, saying that no officials in either country own the naming rights to the lake.
“The Americans can call it whatever they want to call it,” Isaacs said. “It is Lake Ontario.”
Canadian Minister of Industry Mélanie Joly shrugged off Trump’s initial threats to change the name earlier this week.
“We’ll always call it Lake Ontario. Period,” she said. “We’re proud of our Great Lakes.”
