Trade talks collapsed. Now Canada and the US are fighting over why.

Canada’s top negotiator brings receipts to fight over failed negotiations.

Janice Charette, Canada’s top trade negotiator to the United States, is challenging Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s version of events that a last-minute ask by the Canadians on autos caught the Trump administration by surprise and helped doom the deal.

Ever since talks collapsed on Aug. 21, Canadian and American officials have been blaming each other for making too many last-minute requests. Both sides are now jostling for credibility as reliable narrators, while the fallout risks further escalating the trade war.

“We saw him a couple of times during these most intensive negotiations, with an effort to try to make sure he understood where we were coming from and what Canada’s interests and positions were,” Charette said about encounters with Lutnick after the threat of new tariffs last month forced Ottawa into intensified negotiation rounds with Washington.

“But we were not negotiating with him. The negotiations were done through Ambassador [Jamieson] Greer.”

Efforts to bring Lutnick on side did not work.

“The words ‘medium- and heavy-duty trucks’ were raised in these negotiations on Friday at 4 o’clock,” Lutnick told reporters last week, insinuating poor strategy on Ottawa’s part.

Not accurate, Charette said in an interview.

“I can tell you that back in the latter part of July, in proposals that I was sending to the United States, it was very clear that when we talked about the automotive industry, that trucks were in there,” said the former diplomat.

Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters the day after recalling Charette and Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc to Ottawa that there was “no rationale” given for the carveout excluding medium and heavy trucks from tariff relief.

Negotiators had reportedly landed on a deal to lower sectoral tariffs on Canadian-made cars from 25 to 15 percent, subject to U.S. content requirements — a definition that varies by model based on confidential agreements made with the U.S. Commerce Department.

“Every note and every document” sent to U.S. negotiators included what the Canadian side wanted to see on autos, Charette said. “It was very clear it included all of the autos that Canada produces as well as auto parts.”

Charette interjected with the words “and medium and heavy” every time the Trump administration tried to restrict tariff relief to passenger and light vehicles.

“It almost got funny,” she said.

New 50 percent tariffs went into force on Aug. 22, targeting $20 billion in imports from Canada after negotiators failed to find resolutions addressing the White House’s issues with Canadian bans on U.S. booze, Ottawa’s retaliatory auto tariffs and dairy policies.

Charette said the lack of clarity around a concept floated by Greer about having a check on Canada’s future free-trade agreements, hours before negotiations collapsed, marked a red line.

“It wasn’t clear whether what the U.S. was asking for was a consultation on future trade agreements, a ban on free-trade agreements, a veto on free-trade agreements,” she said, adding there was no text exchanged on this point.

“They were certainly concerned that Canada was going to enter into additional free-trade agreements that could, for example, increase steel imports into Canada” — a topic of perennial concern to White House trade adviser Peter Navarro.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t clear what the U.S. wanted.

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“But to us, it represented a constraint,” Charette said.

Canada hit back with countertariffs, including new duties on American steel and aluminum making up the bulk of measures designed to support workers and build political pressure in certain states.

Since the imposition of Canadian retaliatory measures, senior Trump Cabinet members, such as Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have accused the prime minister of proliferating anti-American, anti-Trump sentiments.

Getting back to the negotiation table will require heads to cool at the top.

Carney’s decision to walk away from negotiations established a new frontline after he used a speech in Davos to rally the middle powers of the world to stand up to economic coercion — and to Trump.

President Donald Trump has increased his trolling of Canada in recent days, posting AI-generated videos of armed anthropomorphic Canadian geese patrolling a newly named “Lake America” — and celebrating a deal that promises increased U.S. control of Venezuela’s oil reserves as an opportunity to put Canada “on notice.”

“I don’t want Canadian cars, I don’t want Canadian parts, I don’t want Canadian anything,” Trump said in a social media post on Sunday.

On-and-off trade negotiations resumed in March after Trump terminated talks in the fall over an ad by the Ontario government that used Ronald Reagan’s voice to narrate an anti-tariff message to Americans.

Charette, a former diplomat and top federal civil servant, has kept a low profile since stepping into the high-pressure job in February. Her top priority, she said, has shifted to the package of retaliatory and support measures for Canadian companies expected to feel the brunt of the Section 338 tariffs that negotiators were unable to halt.

“If the day comes when the United States and Canada go back to the negotiating table, we will approach that as we always have in the interests of Canadian workers — to try and get a deal that we’ll negotiate in good faith as we always have, with integrity and with the interests in mind of those workers and their families.”