In interview with Financial Times, Jamieson Greer says Canadians have ‘whipped up’ dispute into ‘giant thing’

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CANADA: US President Donald Trump’s top trade official says it’s “unhinged” for Canadian leaders to characterize the administration’s tariffs as a trade war against Canada. In an interview with the Financial Times, Jamieson Greer downplayed the significance of the recently imposed 50 per cent US tariffs to the Canadian economy and chastised Prime Minister Mark Carney for how he has described the trade dispute.
“Prime Minister Carney used the term ‘war.’ It’s not a word we use, right? We don’t talk about it that way. For us, it’s business, it’s economics,” Greer told the FT News Briefing podcast.
The tariffs that took effect in August apply to just five per cent of Canada’s exports to the US, Greer said.
“To kind of have it whipped up into this giant thing, where we’re talking about war and economic attacks and all these things, it’s a little unhinged,” he said.
The podcast was posted on Saturday, before Canada’s retaliatory tariffs took effect on Tuesday; the US quickly further responded with a plan to ban imports of Canadian alcohol, motorcycles and several food products, starting on Sept. 29. Greer’s office freshly amplified the podcast by sending a news release with links to the interview and excerpts of his comments. “It is the Canadians that came out and said, ‘this is a war, this is an economic attack,'” said Greer in the interview. “We’re just putting additional fees on foreign goods made by foreign workers in foreign countries. That’s all a tariff is.” Greer indicated in the interview that he had presented options to Trump for responding to Canada’s retaliatory tariffs and that the president “might pull the trigger.” Trump pulled that trigger on Tuesday evening by announcing the import ban, a plan to make Canadian companies ineligible for one US government procurement program and some adjustments to the Canadian goods subject to the new 50 per cent tariff.