Canada’s minister responsible for trade with the United States said on Thursday that a pledge from a Trump administration official to not challenge Canadian laws around French language and Canadian culture could provide an opening to renew negotiations.
Trade talks between the United States and Canada, its second-largest trading partner, collapsed late last week into a battle that Prime Minister Mark Carney compared to war, as the Trump administration announced severe tariffs and Canada retaliated with its own.
After Mr. Carney revealed that the United States’ designs on French language measures had contributed to the breakdown of negotiations, the issue has dominated reports about the trade dispute from French language news outlets based in Quebec, and further fueled animosity across the country toward President Trump.
Among the points that officials clashed over were Canadian laws and regulations protecting the use of French in daily life and promoting French-language movies and shows, as well as general Canadian culture online. The minister, Dominic LeBlanc, alluded to those rules on Thursday, referring to Canadian laws that require online streaming services to make it easier for users to “discover” shows and movies in French.
“Canada welcomes that the U.S. is now withdrawing its positions on discoverability and labeling and is confirming that measures to promote French language and Canadian culture will not be subject to future U.S. trade actions,” Mr. LeBlanc said in a social media post. “We look forward to further constructive U.S. clarifications on their other positions, which would create the possibility of a mutually beneficial trade agreement that respects Canadian sovereignty.”
But on Thursday afternoon, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, was less diplomatic about the role of language during the failed trade talks. Speaking to reporters in Washington, he said, “Do I care about how the Québécois speak? I mean, what could matter less to America? We don’t care. So the fact is: we never bought those words up.”
Reporting by The New York Times found that hard line interventions in the trade talks by Mr. Lutnick on the key issues of steel, aluminum and auto ultimately brought on their failure.
Mr. LeBlanc appeared to be reacting to comments made by Jamieson Greer, the United States Trade Representative, in an interview with CBC News, the Canadian public broadcaster, that aired on Wednesday.
In the interview, Mr. Greer said that laws and regulations to make it easier to find French content on streaming services had been “highlighted” by the American side, but he said that they were not a make-or-break issue.
“President Trump, myself and the U.S. government recognizes the importance and sensitivity of the French language in Canada,” Mr. Greer told the broadcaster. He added: “There is no way we would let a good deal go by for something like this. This is not something where we push hard or condition or red line.”
Mr. Greer’s statement was a shift from the sometimes acrimonious exchange of words across the border in recent days. However, later on Thursday, Mr. Trump, speaking from the Oval Office, may have undone any good will by signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes shared by both countries, to “Lake America.”
In a strongly worded speech on Saturday, Mr. Carney said that Canada had been “attacked” by the Trump administration’s trade moves and that the two countries were now “at war.” Among the reasons for his decision to call off the talks, Mr. Carney cited American attempts to negotiate away Canadian users’ ability to find shows and movies in French, one of Canada’s two official languages, and other laws requiring the use of both languages equally, including on labels and packaging.
The equal status of French and English is mandated in Canada’s Constitution, making it virtually impossible for Canada to bargain over them, although the potential political backlash to such changes in Quebec is an equally powerful restraint. On Thursday, Christine Fréchette, the premier of Quebec, opened campaigning for a provincial election to be held in October by saying that Mr. Trump is her “principal adversary” in the campaign.
“We are being attacked head-on, like never before, by our largest economic partner,” she said. “We’ll have to defend ourselves, you have to know how to defend yourself.”
On the matter of tariffs, Canada made changes of its own on Thursday. When the country imposed retaliatory levies on hundreds of American goods earlier this week, following Mr. Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on hundreds on Canadian products, one category stood out. Canada’s list, which covers about $20 billion in imports from the U.S., contained dozens of kinds of fish, fresh and frozen, including herring, shell fish, tuna and flat fish, all identified by their scientific names in Latin.
Mr. Trump had not targeted Canada’s seafood sector with tariffs, puzzling some in the fisheries industry who viewed the move by Mr. Carney as a provocation. Canada’s tariffs come into effect on Sept. 8.
“He’s starting something that Donald Trump didn’t start,” said Chris Poirier, a seafood buyer in the fishing village of Chéticamp, Nova Scotia, adding that he thought it was counterproductive for Mr. Carney to “go after the fishing industry.”
On Thursday, however, the government of Canada said in a social media post that it had changed its mind and American fish would continue to enter Canada tariff free.
The fishing industries of Atlantic Canada and New England are as integrated as the auto industries in Ontario and the United States, said Stewart Lamont, a lobster industry expert in Nova Scotia.
By including Canadian seafood products — particularly lobster, the sector’s most valuable export — in its tariffs package, Canada looked to inflict pain on a state like Maine, he said. However, the move risked driving down the price of lobster and triggering job losses.
In a statement, John Fragos, the spokesman for François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s finance minister, said the list was revamped and fish were purged “in the interest of strengthening Canada’s sectors and our tariff response — and to better match the American tariffs.”
