As US-Canada tensions flare, who’s calling the shots in Trump’s trade team?

Peter Navarro, Jamieson Greer, Howard Lutnick. Photograph: Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenPeter Navarro, Jamieson Greer, Howard Lutnick. Photograph: Getty ImagesUS newsAs US-Canada tensions flare, who’s calling the shots in Trump’s trade team?US trade representative Jamieson Greer has a level-headed reputation but commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and White House adviser Peter Navarro also have key roles

Having reportedly read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in French, during a military tour of duty in Iraq, Jamieson Greer considered himself an unlikely target for accusations of francophobia.

But Donald Trump’s US trade representative, hitherto one of the president’s less high-profile cabinet members, found himself in that uncomfortable position amid the acrimonious collapse of bilateral trade talks with Canada that now threatens to degenerate into an all-out trade war between the two close trading partners whose economies are tightly intertwined.

An apparent pending deal between Washington and Ottawa aimed at avoiding damaging tit-for-tat tariffs broke down at the last minute, with Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, claiming his country had come “under attack” from the US.

Among the multiple and complex points of disagreement was a Canadian accusation that US negotiators had pressed for a weakening of legal protections for the French language, which is most heavily spoken in the province of Quebec.

Canadian provisions include legislation that mandates streaming and online video companies to invest in and promote Canadian content and promote the French language. Carney cast US objections to such regulations as a deal breaker, and said they amounted to “threats to French language and culture”.

For Greer, a fluent French speaker who once served as a Mormon missionary in Belgium, France and Luxembourg, the charge was too much. “I speak French, too,” he told CNBC, dismissing the claims as “a funny, fake story”.

“My kids speak French,” he said. “One of my kids was born in Paris. So I like the Québécois, and I like that they speak French. What we don’t like is a situation where Canada, the federal government, forces American tech companies to take their earnings and give a percentage to their competitors in Canada.”

The controversy may be the closest glimpse the public will see of Greer being rattled. By Thursday, in what was being being seen by some Canadian officials as a potential olive branch, he was peddling a softer line on the language issue.

“President Trump, myself and the US government recognizes the importance and sensitivity of the French language in Canada,” he told CBC, the Canadian broadcaster. “We know that this is quite sensitive and quite important, and we actually champion the use of French.”

The impact was undermined hours later, however, when Trump publicly signed a retributive executive order supposedly changing the name of Lake Ontario – one of the Great Lakes which has shores on both countries – to Lake America. Petty as the act was, it seemed to graphically illustrate the limited freedom of manoeuvre held by anyone representing a president so preoccupied with trade.

And Greer is not the only official seeking to steer the president’s aggressive agenda on trade – raising questions over who is really in control.