President Donald Trump's ongoing trade war against Canada has not gone well for him, with Americans suffering from higher prices and Trump himself seeming taken aback by Canada's defiant response. Now a recent report reveals that at one point, Trump's antics with Canada "almost got funny," at least according to key players involved in the negotiations on the Canadian side.
In their profile of Canada's chief U.S. trade negotiator Janice Charette, "a source familiar with bilateral negotiations, granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks, said the two sides had resolved '90 percent of the problems' when [Prime Minister Mark] Carney decided to pull Canadian negotiators out of Washington, claiming the fine print in the deal included too many new red flags," reported Politico's Zi-Ann Lum on Wednesday.
Lum added "U.S. officials insisted Canada tried to pull a fast one, requesting at the last minute that medium and heavy trucks be eligible for lower Section 232 — something Charette said she’d been asking for since July." Charette then added that "they were saying no, and we were saying it has to be included. So if they thought we had a deal with them: No, we didn’t. We never had that deal. Nothing’s done until everything’s done in a trade deal."
In the report, Politico continued that "autos emerged as one of the issues that contributed to Carney’s decision to walk from talks with Greer, who led negotiations with Canadian officials. Charette said 'every note and every document' sent to the U.S. made clear the demand was for tariff relief for 'all of the autos that Canada produces, as well as auto parts.' She said that during negotiations, every time the U.S. side tried to limit tariff relief on autos to passenger and light vehicles, she had to say the words 'and medium and heavy' aloud."
The official added to Politico, “It almost got funny." Canadian business experts affirmed her account, with one auto industry official telling Politico of America's claim that "I find it hard to believe. Janice knows her brief extremely well, and she would know that medium and heavy duty — there’s production and planned production in Canada for it. Any deal on autos would have to take into consideration the trucks produced in Ford’s Oakville plant and GM’s Oshawa plant.”
Speaking to AlterNet earlier in September, Dr. Richard D. Wolff — professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst explained why Canada has resisted Trump instead of bending the knee to him. In addition to his tariff wars, Trump has insulted Canada by referring to the nation as "America's 51st state" and renaming Lake Ontario as "Lake America."
"I am not surprised that our government is surprised," Wolff told AlterNet. "Our government is busy strong-arming people around the world in every way that it can, militarily, economically, politically, and discovering time after time to their amazement, if you take them seriously, that the folks are going to resist. And that's what's going to happen."
He added that Carney is merely acting on the widespread sentiment within Canada itself.
"It's not just Mr. Carney, he is the expression of something that he knows as a politician is now a very popular view in Canada," Wolff explained. "He's not going to be held to blame because this or that difficulty happens. If he can show, as he often can, that the United States' hostility, tariff policy number one, is the root cause, then he gets a pass. The kind of anger that might often be addressed to a politician won't be, because they correctly perceive that the problem is something else. And so they appeal to the politician when he comes up with solutions or attempted solution to keep workers' needs in mind."
