OTTAWA — The Americans weren’t happy. But Howard Lutnick seemed furious.
It was early March 2025, the final days of Justin Trudeau’s prime ministership, and the trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump had only just begun. Ottawa had struck back with retaliatory tariffs against the first volley of U.S. import duties. Two days later, Trudeau and his advisers gathered in his office for a phone call with the American president, according to two Canadian officials with knowledge of what happened, who agreed to speak about sensitive discussions on the condition they weren’t identified.
During the conversation, which both officials described as heated, Trump brought in Vice President JD Vance and Lutnick, the New York billionaire who serves as commerce secretary. The Americans spoke of how they would now exempt goods from tariffs if they complied with the North American trade deal that Trump had signed during his first term.
Shouldn’t the Canadians be grateful?
As it turned out, Ottawa still saw the remaining tariffs as an unjustified violation of the trade deal, and would therefore still retaliate. This, according to both officials, is what offended the Americans — and nobody more so than Lutnick.
One of the officials said Lutnick sounded shocked and angry, expressing fury that Canada had the gall to strike back when the U.S. was softening its position. The second official described Lutnick as “losing his s — t,” and said his tone became “bananas” over the course of the call.
“He’s a guy whose basic instinct is to revert to anger,” they said. “He’s been an ultimate disrupter.”
That perception of Lutnick has hardened since Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended trade talks with the Trump administration in August, declaring the U.S. had “attacked” Canada with last-minute demands that would have eroded the country’s independence.
Sources have told the Star and other media that Lutnick was a factor in the collapse of negotiations, particularly over the exclusion of trucks made in Oshawa and Oakville from American tariff relief that was on the table, while the commerce secretary and other American officials blamed the Canadian side for unreasonably pushing too hard and walking away from the best deal in Trump’s new world of tariffs and trade transactions.
The embodiment of the Trump administration
Regardless of what happened, observers — including some with direct knowledge of Lutnick as an American interlocutor — see in the commerce secretary the embodiment of the Trump administration’s transactional negotiating approach. Brash, slick-haired, cocksure, the erstwhile Manhattan financier was a key player in jockeying over the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which saw the U.S. extract further concessions from Canada allowing the opening of the $6.4-billion structure, which was financed entirely by Ottawa. Last year, behind closed doors at a conference in Toronto, Lutnick declared Canada should find something else to build in Ontario’s car-making heartland, since the U.S. planned to dominate the auto sector and “there is nothing Canada can do about it.”
Portraying Lutnick as the villain in the relationship would be simplistic, however. He can be charming and pleasant to deal with, said one Canadian official, adding that Lutnick’s bluster can also be read as a performance, and a tactic to accomplish his goals. But the official said it’s also true that Lutnick can turn on a dime, and show the edge and intensity of a ruthless New York dealmaker.
“He’ll stab you in the stomach while smiling in your face,” the official said.
Lutnick’s office did not respond to requests for comment from the Star.
‘The most Trumpian member of Trump’s cabinet’
Lutnick, 65, came to politics after a long career in the New York financial world. He helped raise money for Trump’s 2024 presidential run, and co-chaired his transition back to the White House as Trump met with petitioners at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. A profile in The New Yorker described him as “the most Trumpian member of Trump’s cabinet,” and Lutnick has seemed to embrace the president’s style and mercantilist world view. On a podcast in 2025, he echoed Trump’s notion of a halcyon era of high tariffs in the U.S., when taxes on imports filled government coffers in the absence of personal income tax.
Accounts of Lutnick’s past describe his ascent in the 1980s and 1990s at the New York investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald. By his mid-thirties he had control of the firm following a bitter succession battle with the widow of the company’s founder, in which Lutnick was accused in the New York Times of staging a “palace coup.”
One Canadian official said that Carney’s lead cabinet minister on U.S. trade, Dominic LeBlanc, established a solid relationship with Lutnick in early 2025. The pair texted often and got along well, the official said, even as the trade war heated up.
But Canadians have observed Lutnick’s forcefulness in trade talks. He has been seen as trying to assert dominance through his oversight of sectoral tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum and autos — import duties the Trump administration justifies on “national security” grounds.
“He’s outrageous. He is mercurial. He yells. The way he talks in public is like he talks in private. He can be extremely aggressive, unlike Trump, who in private is never really aggressive,” one former official said.
“I think he is driven by the desire to be the top dog, be admired by the president, to always come out on top.”
A life marked by tragedy
Lutnick’s life has been marked by death and tragedy. His mother, an art teacher, died of cancer when he was 16 in 1978, and his father died the following year after he was given the wrong dose at his first chemotherapy treatment for lung cancer, Lutnick told a U.S. Senate committee after he was nominated to Trump’s cabinet.
Cantor Fitzgerald’s Manhattan offices took up the top five floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center. When hijacked planes struck the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees were killed, including Lutnick’s younger brother Gary, who had lived with him in his college dorm room after their parents died. Lutnick told the Senate hearing that the only reason he wasn’t also killed is that he was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten when the attacks occurred.
Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian TV personality and investor, said Lutnick’s response to the disaster and efforts to support victims’ families and rebuild the company are “legendary” in the business community.
“He’s actually a nice guy. You know, he’s an entertaining guy with a lot of energy,” O’Leary said, describing how he last ran into Lutnick in a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C.
“You may or may not like his negotiating style,” O’Leary added. “Everybody’s got their own thing.”
And that rubs some people the wrong way. Last winter, when Lutnick gave the final speech at a dinner during the World Economic Forum in Davos, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde walked out.
Lutnick “just bashed Europe, right, left and centre,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “That was just too much and just unnecessarily offensive.”
The commerce secretary has also faced pressure and scrutiny from fellow Americans. Steve Bannon, the right-wing commentator and former Trump adviser, panned Lutnick’s defence of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs last year as an “unmitigated disaster.”
Last May, after Lutnick admitted he and his family visited the Caribbean island of the disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2012, members of the U.S. Congress accused him of lying about his interactions with Epstein — who had been Lutnick’s neighbour in New York City — and called on him to resign immediately.
A ‘chaotic’ White House
One Canadian official said a big challenge in dealing with the Trump administration is reading who has more influence at any given time in what they described as a “chaotic” and at times “unclear” dynamic inside the White House.
Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association and member of Carney’s advisory council on economic relations with the U.S., said that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer took the leading role in recent talks that almost landed with a deal in late August. But in the final days before talks fell apart, Lutnick got more involved, and it soon became clear to the Canadians that the U.S. would not include medium and heavy duty trucks in any tariff relief, Volpe said — something that could doom factories in Ontario.
“I know for sure that wasn’t the case going into Wednesday night,” Volpe said, citing the evening two days before the negotiations collapsed.
“We were in contact, semi-regular contact, with the negotiating team … The clarity that medium and heavy trucks were excluded came in after Canada repeatedly sought clarity on Friday,” he added. “Whether it came directly from Lutnick or not, it came after Lutnick became directly involved.”
Given Lutnick’s comments last year that Canada must surrender auto manufacturing to the U.S., Volpe said he believes the commerce secretary was responsible for this aspect of the disagreement.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said.
Lutnick, meanwhile, has blamed Canada for adding last minute changes to the deal, and the U.S. maintains that medium and heavy trucks were never part of the deal. On Wednesday, a smiling Lutnick told the U.S. broadcaster CNBC that the Carney government “blew it up for political reasons only” ahead of separatist concerns in the Quebec election and Alberta referendum in October.
“We were treated disrespectfully,” Lutnick insisted.
“It’s just sad the way Canada has treated us.”
With files from Tonda MacCharles
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