Trudeau on Thursday, before Trump announced a reprieve, said Canada will be in a trade war with the United States for “the foreseeable future”. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Trudeau “a numbskull”.
Trudeau’s foreign minister has been even franker. “We won’t get through this, another psychodrama every 30 days,” Foreign Minister Melanie Joly told business leaders in Toronto earlier this week.
“The problem we’ve had is it’s not clear what the American president wants,” she added. “I’ve had conversations with colleagues in Washington saying, ‘Okay, but at the end of the day, what do you guys want?’ And I got the answer, ‘We’re about to know.’ There’s one decision-maker in the system. He’s the only one to know.”
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dismissed the idea that he didn’t know what Trump wants as “fake news” and “so silly” in an interview on Thursday with CNBC.
Trump “calls everybody all the time”, Lutnick said. “I speak to him all the time. You’ve got to be kidding me. The president knows exactly what he wants. We know exactly what he wants.”
But Canadian and Mexican officials said the lack of clarity over demands as well as uncertainty over whether Trump administration officials in bilateral meetings were actually able to deliver on what they said was making discussions incredibly challenging.
The scope of negotiations is not clear, they said, with talks sometimes seeming to be focused on fentanyl and at other times on migration, while on some occasions the focus seemed to be trade deficits.
“The US reasons for the tariffs constantly shift,” said another Mexican official. “If we can’t identify the problem, we can’t identify the solution.”
