Nearly 190,000 Canadians have signed a petition demanding the removal of US ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra.
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it should. He is indeed the same Trump loyalist who acted as US ambassador to the Netherlands during the president’s first term.
Before he started ruffling feathers in Ottawa, Hoekstra spent three years as Trump’s man in The Hague, where his reputation preceded him to say the least.
And now, people aren’t happy about his very public comments undermining the Canada-US relationship.
What is the petition actually asking for?
The petition, launched on Canada’s official parliamentary portal by a Calgary resident, calls on the government to declare Hoekstra persona non grata (a diplomatic term of art meaning an unwelcome person who can be stripped of immunity and sent packing).
It also asks Ottawa to raise Hoekstra’s conduct with Washington and set up a parliamentary committee to review US interference in Canadian affairs. Green Party leader Elizabeth May has agreed to present it in the House of Commons this autumn.
According to NOS, the petition argues Hoekstra has repeatedly undermined diplomatic relations between the two countries. It gained steam fast, jumping from around 29,000 signatures to well over 170,000 in a matter of days.
What did Hoekstra do to annoy an entire country?
Earlier this summer, Hoekstra floated the idea that the annexation of Canada by the US would make a splendid chat topic for Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. You know, casual small talk between neighbours.
For context, Trump has repeatedly mused about turning Canada into the “51st state”, so an ambassador cheerfully suggesting the takeover be put on the agenda did not go down well. Hoekstra had already grumbled about the “anti-American” tone of Canada’s election campaign and criticised politicians who called US import tariffs a trade war.
His response to the backlash? He reportedly brushed off Canadians’ anger as emotional and hard to explain. A masterclass in reading the room.
The Dutch stand with Canada
Canada and the Netherlands are famously close, and it’s not a vague diplomatic nicety.
Canadian troops did much of the heavy lifting to liberate the Netherlands in 1945, and the Dutch have never forgotten it.
We all know about the unbreakable Canada-Netherlands bond, the Dutch royal family still sends thousands of tulips to Ottawa every year as a thank you, a tradition that grew into the Canadian Tulip Festival. There are also a ton of Canadians with Dutch roots.
So an ambassador with Dutch roots poking at Canada’s sovereignty is, let’s say, an awkward look on both sides of the Atlantic.
Why the Netherlands is watching with a knowing smirk
Dutch readers have front-row experience with the Hoekstra brand of diplomacy. And there’s a neat irony worth pausing on: Hoekstra was born in Groningen and migrated to the US when he was a kid.
The man now normalising talk of swallowing up his neighbour and thrashing immigrants on a daily basis is, by any honest definition, an immigrant himself.
He returned to the country of his birth as Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands and promptly became famous for something rather awkward. Back in 2018, Hoekstra got caught on camera denying he had ever claimed there were “no-go zones” in the Netherlands, then denying he had denied it, all while footage of him saying exactly that played on.
We covered his creative relationship with the truth in our piece on how the Trump ambassador lied about his own lies, and the moment was memorable enough to earn DutchReview a quote in international coverage:
DutchReview glory starts at 2:40, but the whole segment is still entertaining all these years later:
Can the petition actually get rid of him?
Short answer: no. Even with a mountain of signatures, a petition can’t remove a diplomat on its own.
Expelling an ambassador is one of the heaviest diplomatic moves available, and only the Canadian government can pull that trigger by asking Washington to withdraw him.
Doing so would almost certainly spark retaliation, from expelling Canada’s own ambassador to slapping on tougher economic sanctions. Canada’s PM Carney sadly has bigger problems than Pete Hoekstra being Pete Hoekstra.
The timing is delicate too. The US and Canada are currently negotiating a new trade deal, with Trump threatening fresh 50% import tariffs on Canadian goods including cement, wine and, poetically, ice hockey sticks. The US embassy in Ottawa has stayed quiet on the petition so far.
Any Dutch-Canadians planning on signing the petition? Let us know in the comments below
Feature Image: U.S State Department/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain (Modified)
