By Cam Scott
On July 29, over two hundred people gathered outside the Winnipeg Art Gallery to protest an appearance by Pete Hoekstra, United States Ambassador to Canada, on his cross-country speaking tour. The event was promoted by the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce as a simple “fireside chat,” but the meeting was far more suspenseful than your average $200 luncheon for the business class. Three months into a fraught assignment, Hoekstra’s road trip was clearly meant to preserve the longstanding integration of US and Canadian corporate monopolies, and to assuage concerns amid an escalating trade war.
Hoekstra has his work cut out for him, and his strained humour hardly softens the effects of Trump’s diatribes against Canada and other allies. Hoekstra has spent much of his camera time so far trying to brush away Trump’s threats as an obvious joke, but this begins to feel like a “good cop-bad cop” routine where his boss remains committed to the bit.
Only weeks before Hoekstra’s cross-country tour, Trump gave an interview in which he restated his desire for Canada to become “the 51st state,” leaving his ambassador to backpedal frantically before his hosts. Hoekstra’s attempts at damage control mimic Trump’s blunt delivery, to the point of sounding like a degraded echo of the President. “Get over it, Canada,” Hoekstra quipped before a May press conference – but his slightly softer brand of schoolyard diplomacy continues to offend both popular and elite interests north of the border.
That said, a cursory roll call of Hoekstra’s Winnipeg reception shows who stands to lose, and who to profit, from this new era of US-Canada relations. Inside the gallery, a cross-section of business owners, sitting members of Parliament and city councillors assembled to learn about “the global economic forces reshaping our cross-border relationship” from a MAGA Republican of hateful pedigree. Outside, a worker’s chorus gathered to oppose the hospitality extended this belligerent by Winnipeg’s own ruling class, with speakers from a range of social movements including Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Manitoba-Cuba Solidarity Committee, Peace Alliance Winnipeg and more.
Who is Pete Hoekstra?
Any ambassador to US interests deserves a cold reception. But just who is Pete Hoekstra, that his profile can effectively condense so many issues of pressing concern?
From 2004 to 2007, he chaired the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, exerting a great deal of influence on the US-led “War on Terror.” Hoekstra was one of the foremost falsifiers of Iraq’s military capacity in the form of alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” repeatedly claiming that Iraq had an arsenal of over 500 WMDs and posed a serious risk to US troops in the region. These lies led to some of the most notable war crimes of the century, and as a Senior Fellow with the Investigative Project on Terrorism Hoekstra spent the next decade publishing vicious apologia for the worst excesses of US foreign policy.
(More than a decade on, Hoekstra rejects the naming of the “War on Terror” insofar as he considers it a too-polite euphemism for a declared war on Islam as such.)
Hoekstra’s bigotry and Islamophobia made him an effective culture warrior in the Dutch context, where he served as US Ambassador to the Netherlands during the first Trump administration. In this capacity, Hoekstra forged ties with the far-right Forum for Democracy, plausibly breaking the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations that prevents foreign ambassadors from meddling in the politics of their host state. And where the US itinerary on border security and immigration is a gift to the Canadian right, including some of Hoekstra’s recent hosts, one can imagine a repeat performance here.
Hoekstra’s Embassy biography boasts of his key role in the MAGA coalition’s second victory, where he worked to unite the Michigan Republican Party around Trump and to flip the state red. But beyond this rallying role, Hoekstra exerts a quiet influence on Trump policy as well. As a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Hoekstra is a credited author of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” – a comprehensive plan for ruling class warfare, directed at any number of social fronts and cultural proxies.
Hoekstra’s contributions aren’t clearly attributed, but the Foundation’s current plans to gut public education quote approvingly from a 1998 report that he prepared for the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development. Predictably, this report recommends a greatly reduced Department of Education, far fewer social programs, and financial transfers to private and religious education, all in the name of “parental choice.”
There’s nothing terribly original to Hoekstra in this right-wing vision, which a Trump executive order of March 20 (“Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities”) basically duplicates. But Project 2025’s blueprint for education “reform,” otherwise credited to charter school proponent Lindsey Burke, reproduces lengthy swathes of language from Hoekstra’s commission almost verbatim.
As founder of the Education Freedom Caucus, Hoekstra’s fingerprints are all over Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education. Not only is this influence worth communicating to people in Canada, where a similar program is underway – this attribution also helps to situate Trump’s escalations in a longer sequence of establishment attacks upon any semblance of a public service.
As both a MAGA insider and a pre-Trump Republican extremist, Hoekstra’s career reveals the continuity of the US right in a moment that is often treated as an exception to business as usual.
A new alignment
In Winnipeg, Hoekstra declined to answer any questions on the status of Trump tariffs or to speculate upon the outcome of negotiations. Rather, his prairie speeches offered a gloating litany of Trump’s successes so far, packed with reminders of the unbreakable integration of heavy industries spanning the US and Canada.
At the Council of State Governments’ Midwestern Legislative Conference in Saskatoon on June 28, he was admittedly bullish. “Within less than 90 days of President Trump coming into office, we have secured our southern border,” Hoekstra claimed – implying non-cooperation at the 49th parallel, where a fabricated crisis of drug smuggling has obliged Canada to bolster security at Trump’s behest.
“On an international basis, under the leadership of the president and the other folks at NATO, a big portion of the western alliance has committed to spending 5 percent of their GDP to secure the stability of much of the world,” he continued, clearly implicating Canada’s new $150 billion war budget. This refutes any prior rumour that Trump meant to break with the US-dominated military bloc, and Hoekstra boasts of Trump’s ability to force payment of European partners in the same breath as he celebrates Mark Carney’s spineless pledge.
Carney’s immediate capitulation to Trump’s NATO spending demands, among other key pieces of deregulatory legislation, make the US ambassador’s job much easier. By Hoekstra’s own account, his Canadian tour doubles as a conference on critical minerals and energy, where he means to console national stakeholders in extractive industries and aerospace alike.
As Hoekstra tempts would-be partners with “huge business and national security opportunities,” it’s important to insist that many interests ultimately stand to benefit from bluffing escalations with the US, and from Carney’s enormous wealth transfer to US-based defense companies with Canadian subsidiaries.
This arrangement doesn’t stop with defence contractors. Up to 1.5 percent of the NATO tithe can be spent on infrastructure, including mining for the mineral components of military technology to “strengthen the defence industrial base.” This more than explains the enthusiasm of provincial compradors (including in the NDP) for NATO quotas, as well as the timing of the federal Bill C-5, which streamlines approval for ecologically intensive “National Interest Projects.”
Hoekstra’s certainty that US trade with Canada can only grow under present conditions draws evidence from our tightly integrated defence industries and the necessity of the critical minerals found here for military use.
This optimism of arms and aerospace, comparatively buffered from recent shocks, failed to console some of the smaller firms who came to hear the US perspective. But Hoekstra came bearing a message of indifference to small and medium producers, preferring to speak over their heads to the monopoly interests who stand to gain from the US style of bargaining.
In Winnipeg, Hoekstra’s highest priority after his visit to NORAD’s Canadian headquarters was the city’s Boeing factory. Here, Winnipeg workers play an integral role in the P-8A Poseidon Multi-Mission Aircraft program, an important piece of NATO’s global interoperability initiatives and the militarization of Canada’s Arctic and maritime borders. Hoekstra’s interest doesn’t end with Boeing or the Poseidon, however, and on every stop of his tour he insisted that Canada must commit to purchase F-35 fighter jets from the US as a condition of participation in NORAD. “Canadians have put on hold buying any more F-35s,” he lamented in Saskatoon. “Just remember Canadians invested a couple hundred million dollars in the development of the F-35, and any F-35 flying anywhere in the world has what? Canadian content.”
Hoekstra is correct about the extent of continental integration in aerospace technology, and Canada’s significant contributions. The Canadian-owned corporation Magellan Aerospace remains a federally subsidized supplier to the F-35, manufacturing the jet’s tail assembly at its plant in Winnipeg and other specialized components throughout Ontario.
While these Canadian plants contribute more than $2 million US in parts per plane, the finished jets are a product of Lockheed Martin, and Canada remains on the line to purchase 88 F-35s from the US company as per escalating pressure from Armed Forces – even as the price threatens to soar from $19 to over $30 billion. With a price tag of this magnitude attached to the fleet, Hoekstra’s aggressive salesmanship starts to sound more like extortion.
Hoekstra Go Home!
The US ambassador’s message on his recent trip was clear – that however much the Canada-US relationship appears to have deteriorated in the last year, Canadian industry is far too beholden to US monopolism for any bourgeois assertion of sovereignty to succeed. This much is surely true, and real political and economic independence will require a working-class agenda to reverse the integration that Hoekstra’s coercive messaging presumes.
As one can see from the protests outside his Winnipeg appearance, a countermovement to US imperialism and its Canadian accomplices is already underway and growing. For many in Canada, Trump’s rhetoric has laid bare the role of the US in Canada as never before, and Hoekstra’s reception in Winnipeg shows that working people are gearing up to fight.
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