Nearly 30,000 Canadians Want Pete Hoekstra Gone. The Rest of Us Should Be Taking Notes.

When a diplomat starts calling the threatened annexation of your country a “term of endearment,” you are not hosting an ambassador. You are hosting a problem.

Nearly 30,000 Canadians have signed a parliamentary petition demanding that Pete Hoekstra, Donald Trump’s man in Ottawa, be declared persona non grata and shown the door. Green Party Leader Elizabeth May will table it in the House of Commons this fall. The petition lays out a pattern of conduct that would get any other country’s envoy expelled without a second thought: Hoekstra publicly mused that Canada’s absorption into the United States would be a “great topic of discussion” for Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney. He told a Halifax crowd he was “disappointed and frustrated” by the “anti-American” tone of Canada’s federal election. He lectured Canadian politicians for calling Trump’s tariff assault what it is, a trade war, and for pulling American booze off liquor store shelves. And when reporters pressed him, his defense was as candid as it was damning: it’s his job to “present the president’s views.”

United States Department of State (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

At least he’s honest about who he works for. The problem is that he doesn’t work for Canada, and he’s been conducting himself as though he does.

The petition goes further than the public remarks, and this is where the story stops being about bad manners and starts being about structural interference. Hoekstra has been linked to a Michigan-based voter identification app deployed by the Alberta separatist Centurion Project. The Alberta Prosperity Project met with U.S. State Department officials three times between April 2025 and January 2026. Hoekstra says he knew nothing about those meetings. An ambassador who doesn’t know what his own State Department is doing with separatists in the country he’s posted to is either staggeringly incompetent or staggeringly dishonest. Neither qualifies him for diplomatic immunity from accountability.

Canada has expelled diplomats before. In 2023, the government declared Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei persona non grata after an intelligence report tied him to efforts targeting Conservative MP Michael Chong’s family. In 2024, Canada kicked out six Indian diplomats and consular officials after the RCMP publicly alleged Indian government agents were running a campaign of intimidation and violence against Canadian citizens, linked to the murder of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C. Those expulsions were framed, correctly, as responses to foreign interference. The standard was clear: if a diplomat uses their post to undermine the sovereignty and safety of the host country, they lose the privilege of staying.

TVA Nouvelles (CC BY 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Hoekstra has met that standard. He has normalized the threat of annexation. He has intervened in a federal election. He has been credibly linked to tools used by a separatist movement that received audiences with his own State Department. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations exists precisely so that diplomatic immunity is not a license to meddle. Persona non grata is the mechanism the convention itself provides.

The U.S. Embassy in Ottawa declined to comment, except to say they are “aware” of the petition. Of course they are. Awareness has never been the issue. The issue is whether the Canadian government will treat U.S. diplomatic interference with the same seriousness it applied to China and India, or whether proximity and power buy a different standard.

Policy Exchange (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Thirty thousand Canadians have answered that question. They are not asking for a gesture. They are asking for a parliamentary committee review of U.S. diplomatic interference in Canadian domestic affairs, a formal declaration, and his removal. The mechanism exists. The precedent exists. The political will is what’s missing. Build it.