Next U.S. ambassador Hoekstra ‘easier to do business’ with: former envoy

OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly welcomed president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for the next U.S. ambassador in Ottawa, a former longtime Michigan congressional representative who voted for NAFTA and later wavered on new free trade deals.

Joly said at a news conference on Thursday at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., that she takes it as a good sign that Trump endorsed the Canada-U.S.-Mexico free-trade deal when he announced Pete Hoekstra as his next envoy to Canada.

She also posted on social media Thursday that Canada looks forward to working with Hoekstra to strengthen bilateral ties and advance shared priorities “as close allies and neighbours.”

The minister was in Washington to talk trade and security with U.S. senators from both parties. Her meeting schedule included top Republican senators Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott and Lisa Murkowski.

Following this trip, Joly is headed to the Halifax International Security Forum, where she said she will be meeting with more U.S. lawmakers, including Sen. James Risch from Idaho.

Hoekstra will still have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, but his early nomination is being taken as a good sign by several former diplomats.

Former Canadian diplomat Colin Robertson, who has met with Hoekstra before, said he’s someone Canada can work with.

“He’s not from the (WWE) or Fox News. He’s an ambassador in the Netherlands previously … and he’s from Michigan, so somebody who understands Canada,” Robertson said. “He’s well suited to the posting and I think it’ll be easier to do business with somebody who has his depth of experience.”

Canada’s ambassador in Washington, Kirsten Hillman, also congratulated Hoekstra on the nomination, posting on social media she looks forward to working with him to make the bilateral relationship “even stronger.”

Hoekstra was a nine-term border-state lawmaker and holds high esteem in Trump’s world. His long career in politics left a wake of stunning headlines, including for a 2012 Super Bowl ad critics and even some Republicans slammed as blatantly racist.

He was Trump’s chosen chairman for the Michigan GOP during a power struggle between two pro-Trump camps. He spoke at Trump rallies in the swing state during the campaign and earned high praise from the president-elect. “This guy, Hoekstra — he’s unbelievable,” Trump said at a February rally in Waterford Township, Mich. “Everything he did in Congress, he was incredible, and then he was an unbelievable ambassador.”

In his first term as president, Trump tapped Hoekstra to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, where he was at one point embroiled in a political interference scandal for hosting a fundraiser at the U.S. Embassy with members of the far-right party Forum for Democracy.

In a 2019 public talk organized by a Dutch news magazine, he said it’s “not an unrealistic ask” that every member of NATO meets the target of spending the equivalent of two per cent of GDP on defence by 2024 — something Trump has railed about, and something Canada will not do until at least 2032. At an event in Ottawa last month, Trump’s former ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft said his administration would expect Canada to meet that target much sooner than 2032.

Hoekstra was a representative for Michigan from 1993 until 2011 and chaired the powerful House Intelligence Committee. In 2019, Trump floated him as a possible pick for national intelligence director.

Not long after he was first elected, he voted in favour of the NAFTA trade deal in 1993 — something he called at the time a simple choice yet also the “toughest decision I have had to face in my first 11 months in office,” according to Michigan newspaper reports from the time.

By 2003, he was opposed to inking free-trade deals, including two proposed with Singapore and Chile, saying that NAFTA led to manufacturers in Michigan to “shift production to Canada and Mexico.” Nearly a decade later, in 2011, he singled out NAFTA as something that had “come to symbolize what Americans believe is unfair trade.”

In the early 2000s, he was one of a number of Michigan lawmakers from both parties raising ire over Toronto shipping its trash into his state.

“Michigan is better than taking Canadian trash,” he was quoted saying in 2004 in the local Michigan newspaper the Ludington Daily News.

The next year he co-signed a letter advocating for a bill that would clamp down on “foreign municipal solid waste” entering his state, according to an Associated Press report from the time.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 21, 2024.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press