OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney and former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton pushed back Thursday after President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the American government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.”Carney invoked the lake’s Indigenous name and more than four centuries of history, while Clinton delivered a three-word response on X: “It’s Lake Ontario.”.“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big,’” Carney wrote on X.“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 then took a broader swipe at the changes taking place under Trump.“We know that America is changing,” he said. “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.”.Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2016 presidential election, offered a shorter dismissal.“It’s Lake Ontario,” she wrote.Clinton also served as a U.S. senator for New York, the state bordering the lake’s southern and eastern shores, from 2001 to 2009.Industry Minister Mélanie Joly had already rejected Trump’s proposed name change during a news conference Tuesday..“We’ll always call it Lake Ontario. Period,” Joly said.“We’re proud of our Great Lakes. We’ve navigated the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, for thousands of years, and it was part of the foundation of our country. And we’ll just stand up for what we have.”Joly described Trump’s threats as “shenanigans” and said Canada would respond strategically.“While all these shenanigans are happening, we’ll just be smart, and we’ll be strategic, and we’ll fight back,” she said.Trump announced the change in the Oval Office before signing an executive order.“We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately, to Lake America,” he said.The order directs the U.S. secretary of the interior and Board on Geographic Names to update the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days and remove federal references to Lake Ontario.It will require U.S. federal departments and agencies to use “Lake America” on government maps, contracts, documents and communications.The order has no legal force in Canada and cannot compel Canadian governments, international organizations, private mapmakers or individual Americans to use Trump’s preferred name.Trump first threatened the change Tuesday after Canada-U.S. trade negotiations collapsed and the two countries imposed 50% tariffs on billions of dollars in each other’s goods.He said the United States did not expect to conduct much business with Ontario following repeated clashes with Premier Doug Ford.The naming order follows Trump’s earlier decision directing the U.S. government to replace Gulf of Mexico with “Gulf of America” in federal usage.
