Can Trump really rename Lake Ontario, ‘Lake America’?
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United States President Donald Trump’s war on geography has opened up a new front – this time on the Canadian border.
Amid escalating trade tensions between Washington and Ottawa, Trump said he would rename the large body of water shared between the US and its northern neighbour.
We break down what Trump has announced, whether he can actually rename this particular body of water, and whether the rest of the world will have to use the new name.
During a news conference in the Oval Office of the White House on Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that changes the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.
Lake Ontario is in North America, on the border between the Canadian province of Ontario to the north and the US state of New York to the south.
The name “Lake Ontario” is believed to be derived from the Huron Indigenous people’s Wendat language word “oniatarí:io,” which is thought to mean “lake of shining waters”, “great lake” or “beautiful lake”.
“The name Ontario is witness to a native presence that existed before the establishment of the United States and Canada, and which is crucial for expressing the historical depth of North America to students and wider communities,” Derek Alderman, the chancellor’s professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, told Al Jazeera.
“Trump’s executive order similarly is an attempt at erasing Indigenous culture from the map, exerting not just an ‘America-first’ ideology across the continent but a decidedly neocolonial geographic imagination in which the map and its names become tools for narrowing whose histories and contributions matter.”
The lake lends its name to the Canadian province of Ontario, which was founded in 1867.
The body of water has already survived attempts by the French in the 17th and 18th centuries to rename it and the name first appeared as “Lac Ontario” on maps in the 17th century, replacing earlier names which had honoured French officials or saints.
Trump said the change would be “effective immediately” and linked it to trade tensions with Ottawa, claiming Canada “has been ripping us off for a long time”.
“Well, they haven’t treated us well. The Canadian officials have treated us very badly. They’re nasty people,” Trump said.
“So the lake change – the Lake of America – was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually.”
However, the actual text of the executive order states that the secretary of the interior will take the next 30 days to work on the name change with the Board on Geographic Names. Doug Burgum, who is not mentioned by name in the order, is the US secretary of the interior.
The US and Canada, whose economic relations have been fraught since Trump’s first term as president from 2017 to 2021, are currently embroiled in a renewed tariff war after failed trade talks.
Last week, Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on nearly $20bn worth of Canadian goods. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in retaliation, has promised to impose “dollar-for-dollar” tariffs against the US from September 8.
“I don’t anticipate that the Lake Ontario name change will do anything to assist [in] the trade war with Canada,” Alderman said.
“I believe the name change, because of the way it is being carried out in such an abrupt, unilateral and vitriolic way by the president, could likely damage the United States’s ability to negotiate, given how much the Lake America mandate is inflaming opinions and defensive posture anxieties in Canada.”
Prime Minister Carney dismissed Trump’s lake renaming order.
“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 wrote in an X post on Thursday.
“Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford wrote on X: “It’s Lake Ontario to Canadians and the rest of the world. Now and forever.”
Tim Houston, the premier of Canadian eastern maritime province Nova Scotia, wrote on X: “We’re into some real foolishness now. It’s Lake Ontario, buddy.”
While technically Trump can call the lake “Lake America” within the US, his order is meeting resistance there as well.
Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul has refused to call the water body by Trump’s suggested name. “New York won’t be calling it that,” Hochul wrote in an X post, responding to the White House announcement.
Alderman said that: “There is an important caveat in that this change does not have any authority on how US private entities [companies, nonprofits, news outlets] refer to the Lake.
“Research has long shown that there can be a disconnect between a new naming being carried out officially by leaders and the ordinary people and their communities using and retaining the older name. That possible dissonance or disconnect can, at the end of the day, shape and in fact lessen the power of a federal mandate,” he added.
He can – but he can’t make anyone use the new name.
There is no single, binding international authority which determines what every country must call a shared body of…
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