Recommended
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded this Thursday to U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to rename Lake Ontario in the United States as "Lake America," asserting that for Canadians, it will remain Lake Ontario "now and always."
"We Canadians also know that calling reality by its name means calling it Lake Ontario: before, now and always," Carney stated in a message posted on X just hours after Trump signed an executive order to change the designation officially used by the U.S. government.
Carney also recalled the indigenous origin and the antiquity of the toponym to underscore his response to the American president.
"The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari'io, which, appropriately, means 'the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.' The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Canadian Confederation and the United States Declaration of Independence," he noted.
The Prime Minister added, in an ironic allusion to Trump's policies, that Canada knows that "the United States is changing: its trade relations, its foreign policy, its national monuments, its hydronyms."
On Thursday at the White House, Trump signed an order instructing the Department of the Interior to adopt "Lake America" in federal U.S. geographic registries, stating that the change takes immediate effect while allowing 30 days to officially complete the process. The measure does not obligate Canada or international organizations to adopt the new name.
The U.S. president justified the measure while once again accusing Canada of taking economic advantage of the U.S. and calling Canadian leaders "nasty people." He also pointed to the possibility of changing the names of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in the future.
The dispute over the lake's name occurs amidst an escalation of tensions between the two countries following the failure of trade negotiations and the mutual imposition of new tariffs. Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes of North America, is located between the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.
[Publicidad]