Events of the last week with the on-again, off-again tariffs have put many Canadians on edge.

After going ahead with 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is pausing them on some goods until April 2.

White House officials said the tariff reprieve would only apply to Canadian exports that are compliant with the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement, also known as CUSMA.

Beauséjour MP Dominic LeBlanc, the minister of finance and intergovernmental affairs, has been talking to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the tariff issue.

LeBlanc spoke with CBC Radio's Information Morning Moncton host Jonna Brewer.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A: I responded just now … to a text message that I got from Howard Lutnick, the U.S. commerce secretary. He's working hard and seems to be up late. I woke up this morning and he'd sent me a message that would come in at 1:50 a.m.

I've been going back and forth with him in the last few weeks, but particularly in the last few days. He broached the idea with me a few days ago that President Trump would exempt CUSMA-compliant exports. So those are goods sent to the United States that meet the requirements of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Free Trade Agreement. It's a good step forward.

We did not lift our retaliatory tariffs on $30 billion of imports from the United States, and I told him we weren't going to lift that initial retaliatory measure until we got to no tariffs, because we didn't think that any of these tariffs are helpful to our economy and certainly the American economy as well.

He understood that. We agreed to postpone by nine days the further $125 billion of U.S. imports to Canada that we would hit with a 25 per cent tariff.

It lines up with a date in U.S. law that President Trump has set of April 2, where the Americans tell us they want to have global tariff decisions.

So what Secretary Lutnick has been saying to me is, look, let's work through the challenges in the Canada-U.S. and maybe U.S.-Mexico relationship — although their Mexican circumstances [are] a bit more complicated than ours, in some respects — to see if we can't resolve this before they get into a very complicated circumstance with China, with India.

You can see that they're very focused on the Chinese dumping into the North American market products.

They're focused on companies that try and get low-cost products from India or China, re-label it as Made in Mexico or Canada. … That's fine. They should focus on that. We should focus on that too. So if we can get the conversation focused on that, it's a much, I think, easier place for us to be.

But we can't get there until we have these tariffs lifted, and we go back to the free-trading relationship, which is in the interest of the American economy and American consumers and Canada as well, of course.

A: Sort of, yeah. … I spoke to him when I landed at the Moncton airport [Thursday] afternoon. He called me as I was literally coming through the airport. I saw the phone ring, I sat down on a bench, and talked to him for a couple of minutes just before President Trump signed these orders.

He's been very collegial, in the sense of keeping me up to date on what he and President Trump are doing.

The challenge is it changes every week.

So I guess we sort of have to accept that we're not responsible for how they prosecute their politics or the decisions the American government makes. I'm very serene about that.

Our job is to figure out the best way to protect the Canadian economy and Canadian workers. But more than just protect our economy — ensure that the economy can continue to grow and that companies can continue to be successful and can be more prosperous.

So this was the circumstance three, four, five weeks ago. I don't know why it can't be the circumstance four weeks from now.

A: He's very businesslike. It's very professional. There's no personal complication at all.

I first met him when we went to the supper at Mar-a-Lago with President Trump after his election before the inauguration, so I think it was early December or end of November.

I went with the prime minister to supper. [Lutnick] was sitting two seats away from me. His wife, Allison, was sitting beside me. He's a compelling guy.

The story [is], he was CEO of a big Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, that became globally known after 9/11, when almost 700 of their staff died in the attack on the Twin Towers. His brother died. He was the young president of that significant business, and the reason he survived, he wasn't at the office that morning because he'd taken his daughter to her first day of kindergarten.

This became known in the aftermath of that horrible terrorist attack. He became well-known in the United States. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars for victims of 9/11. So his story, and … I talked to him about that, and it's very much part of who he is.

He strikes me as somebody who is a very successful New York businessperson who has known President Trump for 30 years. They're clearly friends. And he has a function as the commerce secretary that's essential to try and iron out some of this trade chaos.

So we're going to continue to work with him in the best way we can.

A: Therein lies the challenge. The original justification was border security, illegal migration and the traffic of illegal fentanyl into the United States.

The facts bear out, I think, a very good story about Canadian collaboration with U.S. authorities. I was the public safety minister 2½ months ago. We were doing, and had been for some time, a lot of good work with U.S. drug enforcement agencies, the FBI, the RCMP. … So the collaboration, co-operation is extensive, and it was achieving results.

The RCMP were literally kicking down doors and arresting people in some of the super labs producing this toxic fentanyl in Canada, people were being dragged before the courts with serious criminal charges.

The challenge is President Trump decides that he's going to punish the Canadian economy because there's an opioid drug crisis in the United States that, sadly, we also have in Canada.

And this is what I've been saying, and the prime minister said it to Mr. Trump at the supper at Mar-a-Lago: there's no daylight between the government of Canada and the government of the United States in wanting to fight criminal, trans-national drug cartels that are killing people in the streets, sadly, of big and small communities across our country too.

So I hope that common sense can prevail.

And again, last week, we were told Tom Homan, Mr. Trump's border czar, had a very successful and positive meeting with the commissioner of the RCMP [and] my colleague, David McGuinty. So often, in the end, we get to the right place.

There's a certain amount of turbulence on the way through, but usually you land in one piece, and it's fine. That's sort of where we go.

But this turbulence is not helpful to the Canadian economy because business people are making decisions on investments, on expansions. And if this uncertainty continues, there is necessarily sort of a contraction in investment decisions, which will not be helpful to the Canadian economy.

So as the finance minister, I'm focused on how to get through this as quickly as we can, so that business people can continue to make decisions and investments that are in the interest of our economy and workers in Canada, and not clouded by this confusion coming out of Washington.

A: No. I've been reassured and encouraged by the reaction of unity and the emotional reaction of Canadians to this unjustified attack on our economy.

So Canadians would properly not accept that the government or the governments — plural because provinces have been very, very constructive allies with each other and with the government of Canada — they would not understand why we took our foot off the gas in terms of our response measures until we get to a situation where we're back to having no tariffs in the trade between Canada and the United States.

So pausing by an additional nine days the second tranche is a reasonable thing to do.

The Department of Finance told me originally that for the next $125 billion of counter-tariffs, the more time we can give Canadian businesses to change their supply chains, to adapt, to look for other sources of supply than American suppliers, the better.

I think Canadians expect us to remain resolute in the face of this completely unjustified threat to the economy, and I said that to Secretary Lutnick, that he should expect that our measures would remain in place. But let's work quickly to remove all of the tariffs, and then, of course, if their tariffs are rescinded, so too will ours be.

That's got to be where we want to get to, and we can't piecemeal it out and take sector X out and then sector Y, and then what about some other sector? You could see how quickly that becomes divisive in Canada, and it's not an effective way, I think, to negotiate.