The Ottawa Insider At The Center Of Canada’s Trade Fight With Trump

Canada’s fight against President Donald Trump’s trade war is not Janice Charette’s first high-stakes geopolitical divorce.

Prime Minister Mark Carney pulled the self-described hockey mom and esteemed former top public servant out of retirement earlier this year and into a job as Canada’s chief U.S. trade negotiator to lead the technocratic side of trade talks with Washington.

Charette, like Carney, is uniquely qualified for the moment.

Her former life as Canada’s envoy in the United Kingdom during Brexit coincided with Carney’s tenure as governor of the Bank of England, where she trained British officials to negotiate with a country undergoing political and economic rupture.

Now, she’s on the front line charting Canada’s economic future with the United States.

“We’re having a moment,” Charette told a Toronto auto industry conference in June, making rare public comments about Canada-U.S. relations.

Trade talks meant to avoid new U.S. tariffs on Canadian imports collapsed last month.

Both sides blame each other for being unserious about finding a path out of a death spiral of retaliatory measures that risk tanking North America’s integrated auto industry. Canada’s auto sector now hangs partly on Charette’s ability to negotiate with a louder, more combative Trump team.

And while the U.S. keeps accusing Ottawa of walking away from the best deal on offer, Charette insists Canada never had that deal in the first place.

Brexit, Covid and convoy chaos

Born and raised in Ottawa, Charette is the daughter of a hairdresser mother and a gasfitter father — and the first in her family to go to university. They taught her that “anything you're going to do you have to do right,” she told a government podcast. She got her first job in the federal government in 1984 at the Department of Finance, beginning a 40-year climb to the top of the public service.

As she quickly ascended the ranks, she and her husband agreed he’d be the stay-at-home parent. In 2014, she became the second woman ever to be appointed clerk of the privy council, serving as secretary to the Cabinet and in charge of 250,000 public servants. She was promoted by then-Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper before Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau abruptly replaced her with her deputy two years later, sending her to London as high commissioner.

Trudeau brought her back in 2021. He appointed her to her old job heading the federal public during a tumultuous period for the Canadian government. She helped navigate the Covid-19 pandemic when Parliament shut down and Canadian schools and businesses were told to shutter, and steered the government’s transition to hybrid work. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, followed shortly by the so-called Freedom Convoy, during which protestors blocked border crossings set up encampments in downtown Ottawa to push for a range of causes, from ending pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates to calling to overthrow an elected government — inspiring right-wing movements worldwide.

It was during this crisis that Charette employed her “no idea too crazy” approach to problem solving. It was Charette who suggested invoking the Emergencies Act, a controversial untested law, to clear protesters’ monthlong blockade of Parliament Hill and at border crossings. Courts have given conflicting rulings on the legality of invoking the law, but a federal inquiry determined its use was "appropriate" at the time.

Charette now finds herself at the table with Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc, a veteran political operator and “fixer” whose long relationships across Canada and in the U.S. have been assets for Carney; the prime minister entered politics just 17 months ago. Former Bay Street executive and investment manager Mark Wiseman is Carney’s man in Washington, an unconventional pick to match the business bonafides of Trump’s Cabinet.

Opposition parties dismiss Charette as the embodiment of the ultimate Ottawa insider — though praise her in the same breath for being a tough nonpartisan talent. Ottawa’s approach to trade war negotiations has been panned as opaque. Canadian stakeholders joke they get more intel from calls held by Greer’s office than they do from their own government. But that’s outside Charette’s remit. Carney ultimately sets the overall strategy in dealing with the Trump administration — and the president directly. But as a political rookie, Carney’s blind spot is the mechanics of government, making Charette a key player in the prime minister’s inner circle to help him move his agenda more expeditiously.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have attacked Canada in recent days, accusing Canadians of being greedy and walking away from the “best deal” offered to any country.

Any agreement was predicated on Ottawa accepting tariffs that violate the trilateral United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, conditions former Canadian trade officials warned would set a poor precedent given that Carney wants to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports in the next decade to reduce dependence on the American market.

“I was just actually speaking to one of our very senior trade officials who is getting on an airplane this afternoon to go out there to continue that work,” Charette told POLITICO a week after trade negotiations with Washington ended.

The disclosure revealed a sense of her workload as a senior adviser to Carney. While formal talks are on hiatus, Charette’s extensive experience in policy and recent engagement with the Trump administration makes her useful to advancing other areas of Carney’s agenda.

‘We never had that deal’

A source familiar with bilateral negotiations, granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks, said the two sides had resolved “90 percent of the problems” when Carney decided to pull Canadian negotiators out of Washington, claiming the fine print in the deal included too many new red flags.

U.S. officials insisted Canada tried to pull a fast one, requesting at the last minute that medium and heavy trucks be eligible for lower Section 232 — something Charette said she’d been asking for since July.

“They were saying no, and we were saying it has to be included. So if they thought we had a deal with them: No, we didn't. We never had that deal,” Charette told POLITICO in an interview.

“Nothing’s done until everything's done in a trade deal,” she added.

Autos emerged as one of the issues that contributed to Carney’s decision to walk from talks with Greer, who led negotiations with Canadian officials. Charette said “every note and every document” sent to the U.S. made clear the demand was for tariff relief for “all of the autos that Canada produces, as well as auto parts.” She said that during negotiations, every time the U.S. side tried to limit tariff relief on autos to passenger and light vehicles, she had to say the words “and medium and heavy” aloud.

“It almost got funny,” she said.

Canadian stakeholders don’t buy that Canada was making 11th-hour requests on trucks.

“I find it hard to believe,” said one Canadian auto industry official, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive trade talks. “Janice knows her brief extremely well, and she would know that medium and heavy duty — there's production and planned production in Canada for it. Any deal on autos would have to take into consideration the trucks produced in Ford's Oakville plant and GM’s Oshawa plant.”

Beware the ‘atmospherics’

Charette is known around town as a sharp, hard-nosed bureaucrat with wit and an acerbic tongue. Another auto industry official said the idea a carveout would evade Charette is baffling, and that the story about Ottawa’s last-minute scramble on trucks is laughable.

“There's a lot of economics when we talk to USTR,” Charette said at the June auto event about her relationship with Greer and his deputy, Jeffrey Goettman. “There’s a lot of other atmospherics when we talk to some of the other players in the United States administration.”

Trump renamed Lake Ontario after The Globe and Mail reported that Charette had warned Greer any escalation in the trade war would further sour public mood north of the border.

The Trump administration is under pressure from GOP lawmakers, especially those who represent border states, to tone down the rhetoric so as not to antagonize a neighbor that buys $333 billion in American exports annually.

Although the administration insists that Canada rejected a deal it hustled to get after Trump threatened new 50 percent tariffs, Charette keeps pushing back, asserting that free trade under the USMCA is the best deal and that accepting any less would be settling for scraps.