Meet Howard Lutnick: Is this the man who killed the trade talks?

U.S. President Donald Trump (C) speaks as U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick looks on during an event in the Oval Office of the White House on August 06, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Alex Wong /Getty Images

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OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney told Canadians that he ended trade talks with the Americans because the gap between the two countries was simply “too wide in recent days” to strike a deal.

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In reality, however, sources say, it was really just one late-to-the-party American negotiator, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who scuppered the talks with a series of last-minute demands on Canada.

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Those new demands, which reportedly included the U.S. gaining control over which other countries Canada would be permitted to do business with, left the Canadian side with the impression that it had little choice but to walk away.

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“It’s almost like they tried to derail the negotiations,” said one Canadian government source.

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Carney also hinted in his press conference on Saturday at “differences” among the various characters in the Trump administration that came to light when negotiators got down to the finer details of the deal.

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“In these last few days, we were drilling down on specific issues where that might have papered over the differences in the administration, if there were indeed differences,” said Carney.

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A few days after the talks fell apart, Canadians may be asking: Who is Howard Lutnick?

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To understand how he became a cabinet minister for U.S. President Donald Trump, it’s noteworthy how much of Lutnick’s biography, and even personality, overlaps with his boss, almost certainly more than anybody else in that cabinet.

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Like Trump, Lutnick is a New Yorker, born to a Jewish family on Long Island in 1961, who went on to become a Manhattan billionaire. Public sources, such as Forbes, have pegged Lutnick’s net worth at more than US$7 billion.

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Despite losing both his parents before he finished college, Lutnick finished an economics degree in 1983 from Haverford College, a private liberal arts institution in Haverford, Penn that was founded by Quakers in 1833 but didn’t start accepting women in 1980.

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But the key step in Lutnick’s path to extreme prosperity occurred later that year when he was hired by financial services giant Cantor Fitzgerald. Lutnick, who was mentored by the company’s founder, B. Gerald Cantor, rose quickly and became the firm’s chief executive seven years later.

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In 1995, Lutnick went to court over control of the company against his mentor’s wife Iris, as Cantor faced health problems. In legal documents, Lutnick claimed that Cantor no longer had the mental abilities to make decisions for the company.

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When Cantor died a year later, Lutnick assumed control of the company and led a period of growth until the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Cantor Fitzgerald, with its headquarters in the north tower of the World Trade Centre, lost 658 employees, including Lutnick’s brother Gary. Lutnick was scheduled to be in the office on the morning of the attacks, but had taken one of his four kids to kindergarten.