Washington DC - US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's government "unhinged" for characterizing the US' latest round of tariffs as a trade war.
"It is the Canadians that came out and said: 'This is a war. This is an economic attack,'" Greer told the Financial Times in an interview published on Saturday. "We're just putting additional fees on foreign goods made by foreign workers in foreign countries."
"Like, that's all a tariff is. It's just business for us," Greer said. "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."
"By the way, the tariffs we put in place whenever it was, 10 days ago, seven days ago, it only covers 5% of imports from Canada. It's like a rounding error."
"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 in reference to comments made by Carney and other Canadian officials.
Greer's comments came only a few days before Canada's retaliatory tariffs took effect on Tuesday, a move that was quickly followed by an outright ban by the US on imported Canadian alcohol and several other products.
The latest trade dispute between Washington and Ottawa was triggered late in August when Carney's government stepped away from a trade deal the prime minister called "uneconomic" and "unfair."
"We cannot accept what they've offered, and we will not give what they've asked," Carney had said. "You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked."
The Trump administration immediately responded by slapping 50% tariffs across a range of Canadian products, totaling about $20 billion worth of exports.