Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canadians will continue to call Lake Ontario by its centuries-old name after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the shared Great Lake “Lake America” in the United States.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has pushed back against U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” invoking the lake’s Indigenous history and declaring that Canadians will continue to recognize its longstanding name.
Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing that Lake Ontario be renamed “Lake America” for U.S. federal geographic naming purposes.
The move applies within the United States and updates the name used by the U.S. geographic naming system. It does not require Canada, which shares the lake with the United States, to adopt the new designation.
Carney responded by turning to the history behind the name Ontario.
“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big’,” Carney said.
He stressed that the name has existed for centuries, predating the establishment of both Canada and the United States as modern countries.
“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,” Carney said.
Trump’s order comes amid heightened political and economic tensions between Washington and Ottawa, particularly over trade.
Trump had raised the prospect of changing the lake’s name earlier this week before formally signing the order Thursday.
The move also follows his administration’s previous decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” for U.S. federal purposes.
Carney used his response to draw a broader contrast between developments in the United States and Canada’s position on the shared lake.
“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” Carney said.
“Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario, then, now and always.”
The dispute is unusual because Lake Ontario is an international body of water rather than one located entirely within the United States.
One of North America’s five Great Lakes, Lake Ontario sits along the Canada-U.S. border, with Ontario on the Canadian side and New York on the American side. The international boundary runs through the lake.
Trump’s executive order can change how the U.S. federal government refers to the lake, but it does not give Washington authority to determine what Canada calls the shared body of water.
The naming dispute comes against the backdrop of a deteriorating Canada-U.S. trade relationship. Both governments have been exchanging increasingly sharp rhetoric as disagreements over tariffs and the future of bilateral trade intensify.
For Carney, however, the response to Trump’s latest move was framed around more than contemporary politics. By highlighting the Wendat origins of the name, the prime minister presented Lake Ontario as part of a history stretching back centuries before the establishment of either country.
His message was unequivocal: regardless of what name appears on U.S. federal maps, Canada will continue calling it Lake Ontario.
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