Pennsylvania Lawmaker Pushes to Rename Lake Erie After Trump's Lake Ontario Move

A Pennsylvania state lawmaker wants Lake Erie renamed "Lake Pennsylvania," following President Trump's move to rebrand Lake Ontario as "Lake America" amid an ongoing trade dispute with Canada.

State Rep. David Maloney, R-Berks County, is preparing a resolution urging Trump, Congress and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to take the steps needed to change the name, arguing that the lake has grown central to Pennsylvania's modern economy and identity even though the state controls only a small stretch of its shoreline. "This is Pennsylvania's only Great Lake," Maloney said. "Ohio has plenty of shoreline. New York already has two Great Lakes. Canada has four others. Pennsylvania has one. Let's call it Lake Pennsylvania!"

The proposal follows Trump's late-August executive order directing federal agencies to begin referring to Lake Ontario as "Lake America," a rebranding Ottawa has flatly refused to recognize. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has said his government will keep calling it Lake Ontario regardless of what Washington puts on federal maps, and mapping services have split on whether to follow the administration's lead, with Google adopting the new name in the U.S. while MapQuest has publicly refused.

Maloney's office says Pennsylvanians drive in from every corner of the Commonwealth each summer, heading north on I-79 from the western part of the state and west on I-80 from central and eastern counties, to fish, boat and vacation along Erie's shoreline before heading home with money spent in local communities. His office also points to the state's outsized role in the lake's fishery, noting Pennsylvania stocked nearly 500,000 yearling steelhead in 2025, about 40 percent of the total stocked across the entire lake, despite holding only a fraction of its coastline compared with Ohio, New York and the Canadian shore.

The resolution has not yet been formally introduced in the Pennsylvania House. It remains unclear whether Trump or Congress would act on a state-level request to rename a body of water shared among two nations and three U.S. states, or whether the idea will follow "Lake America" into contested territory on maps and in political messaging alike.