IBNS-CMEDIA: Apple has changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on its maps for users in the United States, days after Google made a similar change following US President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to rename the lake, media reports said.
The change is reportedly visible only to users in the US. People accessing Apple Maps in Canada can still see the water body labelled as “Lake Ontario.”
Google had earlier confirmed that its US version of Google Maps would display the lake as “Lake America”, while users in Canada would continue to see “Lake Ontario.”
“The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for ‘Lake Ontario’ to ‘Lake America’ in the United States. Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google said in a statement.
Trump last week signed an executive order seeking to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America”. The move has added another point of contention between the neighbouring countries amid strained US-Canada relations.
The development comes after the recent collapse of trade negotiations between Washington and Ottawa. Following the failure of the talks to produce an agreement, the US imposed new 50 per cent tariffs on $20 billion (C$28 billion) worth of Canadian goods.
Trump has repeatedly pushed for the renaming of the lake, one of the five Great Lakes shared by the US and Canada.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has strongly opposed the proposed name change, pointing to the lake’s long history.
“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,” he added.
The proposed renaming has triggered criticism in Canada, with officials and members of the public arguing that the centuries-old name should not be altered by a US executive order
