The Canada tariff talks collapse has done something that months of trade brinkmanship could not: forced a public reckoning with who, precisely, is running America’s trade policy.
The answer, it turns out, is complicated. Jamieson Greer, the 20th United States Trade Representative, holds the designated role. But Howard Lutnick at the Commerce Department, Peter Navarro in the White House, and Donald Trump himself all have fingers on the lever, and they are not always pulling in the same direction.
The man at the table
Greer was confirmed by the Senate on 27 February 2025, following a Senate Finance Committee hearing on 6 February 2025. The vote was 56 to 43, with 51 Republicans and five Democrats voting in favour. Even then, one Republican, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted against him.
He is not, by any account, an ideologue. Those who have dealt with him describe the 46-year-old as calm, methodical, and genuinely expert. Wendy Cutler, a former US trade representative’s negotiator who has met Greer several times, told the Guardian: ‘He’s been pretty creative in terms of trying to thread the needle with other countries as he tries to promote Trump’s trade policies. His reputation as being very level-headed, a very calm demeanor, and not someone who loses his temper or who grandstands.’
His background reflects a certain self-made seriousness. In his Senate Finance Committee opening statement, Greer described growing up in a family of modest means in the mountains of Northern California, where his family lived in a mobile home and his parents regularly worked several jobs. He served as a military lawyer in Iraq, reportedly reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in French between bombardments. He is a fluent French speaker who served as a Mormon missionary in Belgium, France and Luxembourg.
That background made the accusation from Canada, that US negotiators had pushed to weaken legal protections for the French language, particularly galling for him. ‘I speak French, too,’ he told CNBC. ‘My kids speak French. One of my kids was born in Paris. So I like the Québécois, and I like that they speak French.’
Where the Canada tariff talks collapse actually happened
The mechanics of the breakdown point less to Greer and more to the friction within the US team itself. According to reports, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick objected to the scale of proposed tariff reductions on Canadian steel, aluminium and cars, sectors falling under his responsibility after Trump declared them national security concerns under the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. William Reinsch, a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former undersecretary for commerce, put it plainly: ‘It appears Greer was willing to go farther than Lutnick was.’
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, confirmed as much when he cited disunity among US negotiators as the reason Ottawa walked away. Carney also referred to agreements being ‘signed in pencil’, implying Trump would reopen terms even after they had been settled. The White House denied any rift between Greer and Lutnick. Seasoned observers were unconvinced.
‘Lutnick viewed all this as his turf, and here is Greer, who is the designated guy to be effectively the trade minister if you think about it in the context of other countries, conducting the negotiations,’ Reinsch said. ‘From the Canadian point of view, this was a disagreement that developed late in the day and led the Canadians to believe that the United States was moving the goalposts.’
Then there is Peter Navarro, the president’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing. Reinsch described Navarro as a ‘Trump whisperer’ on Canada, though with less influence than during the first Trump term. Navarro has voiced concern that Canada has allowed the import of nearly 50,000 Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles under a most favoured nation agreement, fearing they will cross the border into the US market. ‘Navarro’s worried that the whole USMCA negotiation is really about how do we prevent Canada and Mexico from being a backdoor to Chinese stuff,’ Reinsch said.
Greer cut his trade teeth as chief of staff to Robert Lighthizer, who renegotiated Nafta into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020. Per the USMCA’s first Six-Year Joint Review, scheduled for July 2026, the United States has not agreed to renew the agreement in its current form, leaving its future unresolved. The trade architecture that Greer helped build is now among the things he is being asked to dismantle or renegotiate.
Reinsch’s verdict on ultimate responsibility is blunt: ‘Trump has very strong fixed views on trade. He thinks tariffs are good. So if you’re going to blame somebody, don’t blame Lutnick or Greer. Blame Trump, because I’m quite confident he had the last word on this.’
Cutler, now vice-president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, offers a warning about what comes next: ‘Other countries are watching the developments with Canada very closely. Some of our other trading partners have expressed similar frustrations to me privately, and so we could be at a turning point.’
The USMCA review in July 2026 is the next hard deadline. If the pattern from the Canada talks holds, the question of who speaks for America will be just as contested then as it was this week.
