President Donald Trump signed an order Thursday renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid ongoing trade tensions between the United States and Canada.
The order formally directs the Secretary of the Interior to take steps within the next 30 days to remove all references to Lake Ontario throughout the U.S. government.
He had previously said he was considering renaming the Great Lake before Thursday's order.
“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, as we don’t expect to do much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.
On Thursday, Trump took his comments one step further, calling Canadian officials "nasty people."
"People oftentimes they'll ask me, 'Who's the worst to deal with on trade?' And I say, 'That's easy — Canada.' They feel entitled, and we can't have that," Trump said.
Last week, President Trump ordered additional tariffs on Canadian goods. Days later, the Canadian government announced that it will match "dollar for dollar" tariffs, with rates of up to 50%, as a direct response to tariffs imposed by Trump.
The tariffs are expected to hit $20 billion in goods.
Both the U.S. and Canada have integrated supply chains, with automobiles and other goods frequently crisscrossing the border for production.
Ontario is Canada’s most populous province, home to about 16.1 million people.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the move, discussing the origin of the name Lake Ontario.
"The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big," he wrote on X. "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. 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."
This is not the first time Trump has changed the name of a body of water. Shortly after taking office again in 2025, he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Some companies, including Google and Apple, updated the name on their maps, though most entities outside the U.S. still refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico.
