Canadian Minister Leblanc and Chief Negotiator Charette will meet with USTR's Greer and Commerce Secretary Lutnick at the Department of Commerce in Washington at 13:00EDT

Canadian Minister Leblanc and Chief Negotiator Charette will meet with USTR's Greer and Commerce Secretary Lutnick at the Department of Commerce in Washington at 13:00EDT.

Meetings at this level, ministers and chief negotiators sitting down with the US trade representative and the commerce secretary, have been the standard format in bilateral trade disputes between Ottawa and Washington, and the venue matters: the Department of Commerce is where tariff and trade remedy decisions are administered, so the agenda is more likely tariffs and sectoral carve-outs than broad framework diplomacy. The pattern in past episodes of this kind is that the meeting itself rarely produces an outcome; it is the readouts and any joint or separate statements afterward that move USDCAD, with the established sequence being headline-driven spikes on leaks, partial retracements once official language lands, and follow-through only when tariff schedules or exemptions are formally published. The actors here have prior form: the US side has used the threat and imposition of tariffs as negotiating leverage, while Canada has historically paired negotiation with prepared retaliation lists, which means a failed meeting is not a neutral outcome but raises the probability of announced countermeasures. Worth watching is whether a statement emerges at all, whether the language references specific sectors such as autos, steel, aluminium or energy rather than general goodwill, and whether further meetings are scheduled, since a bare restatement of positions has tended to reprice CAD risk premia toward the more adverse scenario. The channel is the tariff-sensitive growth and terms-of-trade differential for CAD, expressed mainly through USDCAD spot rather than rates, given the Bank of Canada's limited scope to offset a trade shock in the near term.