Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney has responded to President Donald Trump‘s Executive Order 14420, which renames Lake Ontario as Lake America.
The leader went back down memory lane on the Lake’s designation, saying Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.”
Carney said 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.
“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, foreign policies, national monuments, hydronyms,” he wrote in a post on X.
“Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always,” the prime minister added.
In the action statement issued by the White House, Trump credited the U.S. as the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, a group of five large, connected freshwater lakes on the U.S.-Canada border.
Trump said without its security and investment, the region would not be open for shipping and recreation, noting that the U.S. Coast Guard supplies 9 of the 11 ice-breaking vessels on the Great Lakes,
Washington says the U.S. has invested nearly $4 billion in protecting the Great Lakes in the last decade, “while Canada has invested far less in similar initiatives over the same period”.
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario comes amid the trade row with Canada, which has announced that its retaliatory tariffs on goods from the United States will take effect on September 8.
‘Lake Ontario always’ – Canada’s Carney on Trump’s Lake America