Howard Lutnick, the U.S. secretary of commerce, said on Friday that President Trump was committed to reining back the North American trade deal and blasted Canada for its trade negotiating strategy, adding, “they suck.”
Mr. Lutnick, who was speaking at a conference organized by the media outlet Semafor, was particularly critical of Canada’s effort to push back against the Trump administration. He dismissed a former Canadian trade official’s suggestion that Canada could benefit from negotiating more slowly because political pressure on the Trump administration was increasing, as “the worst strategy I ever heard.”
A spokesman for the Department of Commerce said that Mr. Lutnick was describing America’s unfair trade imbalance with Canada and how Canada “sucks off” America’s $30 trillion economy.
Asked if Mr. Trump was committed to extending the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade deal he renegotiated in his first term, Mr. Lutnick responded that “he thinks it’s a bad deal.”
While some of the U.S. relationship with Canada and Mexico was “fundamental,” Mr. Lutnick said, the trade deal overall was “a bad industrial policy that harmed America.”
“There’s plenty of good in it, but there’s a huge amount of bad in it,’’ he added. “And it needs to be reconsidered for the benefit of America.”
Kush Desai, a spokesman for the White House, said that Mr. Lutnick was “being misquoted.” He added, “Secretary Lutnick was correctly pointing out how Canada, along with many other ‘allies’, has been taking advantage of the American economy and people for decades.”
Mr. Lutnick also derided the recent outreach by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to China as “nuts,” saying the U.S. was the “consumer of the world.”
“Carney has a problem with us,” Mr. Lutnick said. “He gets on a plane and he goes to China. Does he think China, the Chinese economy is going to buy his stuff?”
Mr. Carney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a visit to China in January, Mr. Carney struck a limited agreement to permit 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles a year into Canada on a low-tariff basis in exchange for the removal of Chinese tariffs on a number of vital Canadian agricultural products.
The Trump administration has been preparing to once again renegotiate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or U.S.M.C.A., a deal that Mr. Trump concluded in his first term to replace the decades-old North American Free Trade Agreement. The U.S.M.C.A. requires the three countries to carry out a joint review of their trade deal by July.
The disparaging comments were not new: Mr. Lutnick has expressed his disdain for Canada and its trade positions in the past.
But they were made at a moment of relative calm in the strained relationship between the two partners and allies, as they prepare to enter negotiations over their trade agreement. Mr. Trump froze talks in October, blaming Canada, because of an ad financed by the province of Ontario that used an anti-tariff speech by former President Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Carney also clashed in January, following Mr. Carney’s landmark speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos during which he called for middle powers like Canada to band together to survive the tumult and change of the current era.
Mr. Trump took exception to the speech. “Canada lives because of the United States,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “Remember that Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
More recently, though, the Canadian side has been trying to strike a civil tone and turn the temperature down as trade talks restart.
On Thursday, Dominic LeBlanc, a senior Canadian minister who leads talks with the United States, said that Canada wanted a comprehensive agreement and fast.
“I would have hoped that by last fall we would have resolved part of the situation,” Mr. LeBlanc said of the existing U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and other goods. “Now we’re back around the table to do the work. It is moving forward. I can assure you of that.”
He added that he had spoken with Mr. Lutnick by phone last week, describing the 45-minute call as “productive.”
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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