(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.
The change, which the president said takes effect “immediately,” comes after the president toyed with the idea amid trade tensions with Canada.
Lake America, formerly Lake Ontario, is one of four Great Lakes bordering Canada, with Lake Michigan the only one surrounded by U.S. states.
On Tuesday, the president wrote on Truth Social that he was “giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”
The Center Square previously reported that over the weekend, the U.S. imposed a 50% tariff on about $20 billion in Canadian goods amid failed trade talks.
During the announcement Thursday in the Oval Office, the president teased changing the name of either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Trump, joined by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, assured reporters that all the paperwork had been submitted to support his latest executive order.
However, names set by the Board on Geographic Names apply only to federal documents, according to a Congressional Research Service analysis of the Gulf change. They do not bind U.S. states, private mapmakers such as Google or Apple, or foreign governments, and a United Nations naming convention allows each country to keep its own name for a shared feature. That means “Lake Ontario” and “Lake America” could both appear on maps.
Lake Ontario also raises an obstacle the Gulf did not. Board policy requires that proposals to name features crossing the U.S.-Canada border be coordinated with Canada’s naming authority under a 1989 agreement on the treatment of shared geographic names, according to the Congressional Research Service. There is no equivalent agreement with Mexico. Lake Ontario, bordered by New York to the south and the Canadian province of Ontario to the north, is such a feature. That means a unilateral U.S. renaming could bypass the coordination the agreement calls for.
The lake’s name long predates the dispute, though its exact meaning is uncertain. The word “Ontario” comes from an Iroquoian language. Natural Resources Canada traces it to the Iroquois “kanadario,” meaning “sparkling water,” while other sources render it from Wyandot as “beautiful lake.” Its official Canadian name is set by the province of Ontario, not the federal government in Ottawa, according to the Canadian Geographical Names Database.
A federal renaming would likely be inexpensive, at least on paper. When the U.S. House moved last year to codify the Gulf of America name, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that updating federal documents and maps would cost less than $500,000. But CBO’s work on other renaming efforts shows costs depend on how far an agency takes it.
The Center Square reached out to Natural Resources of Canada, but it declined to comment, citing that it does not “fall within Natural Resources Canada’s area of responsibility,” adding that the Province of Ontario is “responsible for this matter.”
By Sarah Roderick-Fitch and Brett Rowland | The Center Square