For the past two weeks we have worked closely with our Washington colleagues to get the most detailed, corroborated account of what happened when weeks of trade talks between Canada and the United States broke down late last Friday night.
Saturday morning brought a rallying speech from Prime Minister Mark Carney, and the two countries are now locked into a trade war. President Trump restarted his rhetorical attacks on Canada’s sovereignty and signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” a decision derided, mocked and shrugged off by Canadians and others. What comes next?
We worked with The Times’s trade reporter Ana Swanson in Washington, and between us we spoke to two U.S. government officials and three Canadian officials with direct knowledge of the talks, as well as two former U.S. officials and five industry leaders on both sides of the border who were briefed throughout.
We put each side’s claims to the other and found that, fundamentally, there were no major discrepancies between the two narratives, despite the heightened political tensions in the days after.
Our key findings, corroborated by officials on both sides of the negotiating table:
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Talks were positive up until Tuesday night. Mr. Carney offered to collaborate on the Keystone XL pipeline, which delighted Mr. Trump. By the end of the week that was off the table.
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Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was a factor in destabilizing the talks as he intervened repeatedly, including on Wednesday and Friday, to push for tariffs on steel, autos and auto parts, all of which fall under his purview.
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The United States insisted on maintaining the freedom to change its tariff policy on Canada without a dispute resolution mechanism or warning built into the new agreement. It also asked for Canada to notify and coordinate with the U.S. on steel tariffs that Canada enforces on other trading partners.
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Mr. Carney spoke with Premier Doug Ford of Ontario minutes before he pulled the plug on the talks.
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Much has been made of the French-language issue as a dividing line in the talks. Our reporting shows that the U.S. side did advance a demand for Canada to amend or repeal laws that protect Canadian content by asking streaming platforms to surface it more prominently for Canadian users. The U.S. side said that it wasn’t a red line for them.
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The U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, told Ana Swanson that, in terms of stable and official concessions, the United States was offering the best deal of any country in the world.
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Canada’s Conservatives are pressing Mr. Carney to release the text of the agreement he refused to sign. Our reporting shows that the two negotiating teams signed confidentiality agreements (a requirement that is apparently standard in Trump administrations). Additionally our sources told us that the text was constantly changing, meaning that a draft would not necessarily reflect exactly where the latest point of agreement was, even if the confidentiality agreement was to be ignored.
Here’s a gift link to the story, and a link directly below if you already subscribe to The Times.
To help you make sense of a dizzying week in the trade war, we’ve pulled all our coverage into the Canada Letter as a special report.
