Could Trump really rename Lake Ontario? Yes, but here’s why he shouldn’t

"Unilaterally changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America would not only put state authorities of New York in a quandary over whether to follow the federal lead, it would also raise a standardization problem between Canada and the U.S.," writes Tristan Hopper. Photo by Donald Trump/Truth Social

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The Great Lakes mostly have anglicized Indigenous names — Ontario, Huron, Michigan and Erie — and one anglicized French name, Superior. But if U.S. President Donald Trump follows through on his latest threat amid the trade war, the smallest of those lakes could soon have an anglicized Italian name instead, “Lake America,” named directly for the United States of America, which in turn takes its name from Amerigo Vespucci, the 16th century Italian explorer. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday. The National Post explains the diplomatic and legal boundaries of Great Lakes nomenclature, and why they won’t do much to stop a determined president.

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Can Trump do this?

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Well, yes. He’s the president, and as such can make executive orders regarding the naming practices of federally regulated entities in the United States, such as the Coast Guard, and, more to the point, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, and its Domestic Names Committee, which is part of the Department of the Interior. Trump has done this sort of thing before, as in Executive Order 14172, known as “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” which was passed on the day of his second inauguration last year.

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That’s the one that ordered the Gulf of Mexico be referred to as Gulf of America, and indeed Google Maps today lists it as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).” It also officially renamed Denali, the mountain in Alaska, as Mount McKinley. However, it is contrary to treaties and agreements the United States claims to abide by.

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Are there multilateral reasons he should not do this?

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Indeed there are. At the United Nations (headquartered in New York City, the settlement originally known as New Amsterdam), the Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) “supports the national and international standardization of geographical names… (by) promoting the use of standardized geographical names.” So right off the bat, unilaterally changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America would not only put state authorities of New York in a quandary over whether to follow the federal lead, it would also raise a standardization problem between Canada and the U.S. In a conference report from 1972, this United Nations group contemplates the problem of competing names arising when countries do not share a language, and that if they “do not succeed in agreeing on a common name form, it should be a general rule of international cartography that the name forms of each of the languages in question should be accepted.” It says nothing, however, about deliberate renaming of shared lakes as an act of economic belligerence.