US-CANADA: Trump signs order renaming Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 27 to rename Lake Ontario as 'Lake America', a change he said would take effect immediately. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney took to X, writing the Great Lake's name will remain 'now and always'. The order comes after US-Canada trade talks collapsed last week, prompting the two longtime allies to announce tit-for-tat tariffs

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order seeking to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. The move comes after trade talks between the US and Canada collapsed last week, and the US imposed new 50% tariffs on $20bn (C$28bn) worth of Canadian goods. Canada will implement “dollar for dollar” counter tariffs next month.

Trump said the move to rename the lake, which straddles both countries, was effective immediately. He has broad discretion over how the US recognises landmarks but other countries do not have to follow. In response, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said “things must be called by their name, and this lake is called Lake Ontario – today and forever”.

Text of the executive order says it gives the US Department of the Interior 30 days to update the name change with the Geographic Names Information Service – the official repository of domestic geographic names in the US. Carney noted that the name Lake Ontario could be traced back more than 400 years, adding that it preceded the formation of the Canadian Confederation and the US Declaration of Independence. “We know that the United States is changing.

Their trade relations, their foreign policy, their national monuments, their hydronyms. “Canadian women and men also know that things must be called by their name, and this lake is called Lake Ontario – today and forever.” There is no universally recognised international body setting the names of international waters. When Trump took to the White House in 2025, he signed a similar order that changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

Mexico has rejected the name change, arguing a single country cannot rename a shared body of international water. It also led to a legal dispute between Mexico and tech giant Google, which renamed the gulf in its maps application. In that case, Google Maps users in the US see “Gulf of America”, while those in Mexico see the “Gulf of Mexico”.