Canadian PM Carney rejects Trump’s ‘Lake America’ renaming, insists on ‘Lake Ontario’

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has rejected US President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America”, insisting that Canadians will continue to call it Lake Ontario.

Trump signed the executive order on Thursday as tensions between the United States and Canada continue amid an ongoing trade dispute.

Lake Ontario is one of North America’s five Great Lakes and lies along the Canada-US border, with Ontario located to its north and New York State to the south.

In the order, Trump argued that “the deepest parts of the Lake’s waters lying within United States territory, the United States claims most of the Lake’s volume”.

The order also described the lake as having “long been an integral asset to American exploration, settlement, commerce, and defence”.

However, Carney dismissed the renaming effort, pointing out that the name Lake Ontario predates the existence of both Canada and the United States as modern states.

“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontario, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big” 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 said.

“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.”

Geographical names are not governed by a single global authority, meaning it remains uncertain whether Trump’s order will be recognised beyond the United States.