President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America," escalating his feud with Canada days after he first floated the threat.

"We're going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately, to Lake America," Trump said before signing the order.

"We've notified all of the various people that we have to notify," he added. "So we've done everything that we have to do, and this is official and effective immediately."

The move caps a bruising stretch in relations between the two countries, following the collapse of trade talks with Canada — Trump cut off negotiations after Canada moved to impose retaliatory taxes on U.S. technology platforms — and the White House's circulation of an AI-generated map rebranding the lake. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has publicly dismissed the renaming push.

Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America and is shared by the United States and Canada. The Canadian province of Ontario, which takes its name from the lake, borders it to the north and west, while New York State lies to the south and east, and it is the smallest of the Great Lakes by surface area. Toronto, Canada's most populous city, sits on the lake's northwestern shore, and Rochester, New York, is located on its southern shore. Water flows into Lake Ontario from Lake Erie through the Niagara River — which includes Niagara Falls — and drains out toward the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence River, part of the St. Lawrence Seaway that opened in 1959 and links Great Lakes ports to global shipping lanes. The Great Lakes together hold roughly one-fifth of the world's surface fresh water and supply drinking water to about 40 million people in the United States and Canada.

The order is the latest in a series of geography-related renaming moves by the Trump administration, which previously directed that the Gulf of Mexico be called the "Gulf of America" — a January order that also restored the name Mount McKinley to North America's tallest peak, which had been officially Denali since 2015. Federal agencies adopted the Gulf change, as did commercial mapping services such as Google Maps and Apple Maps for users in the United States, though Mexico has not recognized the new name. Federal geographic name changes in the United States are generally processed through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the body responsible for maintaining official place-name usage across the federal government. But its authority ends at the border: Canada maintains its own official place names through the Geographical Names Board of Canada, so U.S. and Canadian usage can diverge on a shared lake. Shared U.S.-Canada boundary waters are also governed in part by the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty, under which the International Joint Commission addresses questions and disputes along the border.

Source: Raw Story