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President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is considering renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid ongoing trade tensions between the United States and Canada.
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“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.
Ontario is Canada’s most populous province, home to about 16.1 million people.
Canadian officials reacted to Trump’s announcement later Tuesday.
“We’re proud of our Great Lakes. We’ve navigated the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes for 1000s of years, and it was part of the foundation of our country. And we’ll just stand up for what we have. And meanwhile, I really think that while all these shenanigans are happening, we’ll just be smart, and we’ll be strategic, and we’ll fight back,” said Melanie Joly, Canada’s minister of Industry.
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Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suggested Canada could cut off electricity exports to the U.S. after Trump announced new tariffs on Canadian imports.
Canada also announced retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. Talks between the two countries broke down late last week.
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“In the end, that momentum reversed and we could not accept what the U.S. had offered, nor could we give what they asked,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Monday.
This is not the first time Trump has discussed changing 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.
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According to the Center for Great Lakes Literacy, the name Lake Ontario comes from the Iroquoian word “oniatarí:io,” meaning “lake of shining waters.”
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