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U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing that Lake Ontario be renamed "Lake America," a symbolic escalation in the deepening trade dispute between the United States and Canada.
Signing the order in the Oval Office, Trump said the change would take hold right away. "We're going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately to Lake America," he said before putting his signature to the document.
The order instructs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the Department of the Interior to update the federal Geographic Names Information Service to reflect the new name.
The renaming comes as ties between Washington and Ottawa have soured sharply following the breakdown of trade negotiations and the imposition of new US tariffs on Canadian goods, which Canada answered with retaliatory measures of its own.
Asked what message the renaming was meant to send to Canada, Trump denied it carried any deliberate signal. "No message," he said.
He nonetheless used the announcement to renew his criticism of Canadian trade practices, accusing Ottawa of having "ripping us off for a long time" and of failing to shoulder enough of the burden for North American defense.
"We lose, on average, over the last 15 years, $60 billion a year carrying Canada," Trump said. "We just can't do it anymore."
Trump said his administration intends to impose steep tariffs on Canadian-made automobiles, framing the move as a way to push manufacturers toward building vehicles in the United States instead.
"We don't want them to make cars for the United States of America," he said, adding that "Canadian officials have treated us very badly."
He described the state of relations with Canada as untenable, saying, "We can't let the whole Canadian thing has been going on for decades, and it has to come to a stop."
Trump drew a direct comparison between the Lake Ontario order and his administration's earlier decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," an action he took shortly after beginning his second term. "As you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico, and we changed it, and now it's very routinely the Gulf of America," he said.
He suggested the renaming campaign could extend further still. "All we need is an ocean," Trump said. "So maybe we'll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we'll change them both."
Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes and forms part of the border between New York state and the Canadian province of Ontario. Naming changes made through such executive orders apply to US federal usage only; Canada is not bound by the redesignation and has given no indication it intends to adopt it.
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