Pete Hoekstra is supposed to be the United States Ambassador to Canada. That job has one main requirement: don’t make the host country want to throw you out. He failed.
Over 100,000 Canadians have signed a petition demanding Hoekstra be declared persona non grata and kicked out of Ottawa. The petition, started by a Calgary woman named Lee Walker, accuses him of “making repeated interventions in Canadian political discourse” and normalizing the Trump administration’s threats to annex Canada as the 51st state. It’s heading to the House of Commons this fall.
Benutzer:Bill da Flute (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsHere’s a question for whoever’s managing this: what did you think was going to happen?
In June, Hoekstra said Canada’s annexation by the United States would be a “great topic of discussion” for Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Trump. A great topic of discussion. The man is stationed in their capital, eating their food, and he’s out here talking about absorbing their entire country like it’s a zoning matter. That’s not diplomacy. That’s a podcast bit.
And it gets better. The petition also flags meetings between US State Department officials and Albertans who want the province to separate from Canada. So while we’re supposedly negotiating a trade deal, our diplomats are apparently chatting up separatists. You don’t need a security clearance to see why that might ruffle feathers in Ottawa. You just need eyes.
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThe US embassy’s response? “Aware of the petition” but “declined to comment further.” That’s bureaucrat for “we know this is a mess and we’re hoping it goes away.” It won’t. Over 100,000 signatures in a country of 40 million is not a fringe thing. Walker herself said it: “It tells me that it’s not a fringe issue, and that a lot of Canadians are uncomfortable with how Hoekstra has been repeating Trump talking points about our sovereignty and Canada as a whole.”
She’s right. And here’s what nobody in Washington wants to say out loud: we’re in the middle of trade talks with Canada. New tariffs are supposed to kick in next Wednesday. The whole relationship is a pressure cooker, and the guy we sent to manage it is doing stand-up comedy about taking over their country. You want to know why trade negotiations are hard? Maybe start with the fact that our ambassador is openly musing about annexation while his boss is threatening tariffs. That’s not a negotiating strategy. That’s how you lose a friend and gain a very angry neighbor.
The Canadians aren’t being unreasonable here. If some ambassador from another country showed up in Washington and started talking about making America the 14th province, we’d have him on a plane before lunch. We’d be furious. But because it’s our guy