Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney hit back at President Donald Trump Thursday after he signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” amid the countries’ trade war.
While Trump’s executive order can’t force its northern neighbor to adopt the name, Carney still took the opportunity to educate the masses about the history and meaning of the lake’s name.
“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big’,” Carney said in an X post Thursday afternoon. “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 also pointed to Canada’s changing relationship with the U.S. and made it clear that the Land of the Maple rejects the new name.
“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” the prime minister said. “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”
Earlier Thursday, Trump threatened to rename the body of water shared between the U.S. and Canada, in response to Ontario Premier Doug Ford criticizing Trump for launching the trade war against his country.
“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.
The new quarrel over the international hydronym is the latest sign of rising tensions between the U.S. and Canada, coming just days after fragile trade talks between the countries collapsed over the weekend. Trump on Saturday imposed tariffs of up to 50% on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods and Carney promised to retaliate “dollar for dollar” after walking away from what he characterized as a bad deal.
This isn’t the first time the president has picked a fight with a neighboring country over geographic names. Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” upon taking office again in January 2025, a move met with fierce opposition, particularly from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum mocked Trump, suggesting she rename North America to “América Mexicana.”
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