More than 200,000 Canadians Signed a Petition to Banish the U.S. Ambassador from the Country
Who would have thought the residents of Canada wouldn't care for the U.S. ambassador constantly calling them the 51st U.S. state?
Photo via Unsplash, Hermes Rivera Splinter Canada
There’s a specific quality that seems endemic to Trump loyalists installed as supposed diplomats or ambassadors to countries with which the United States has shared historically close relationships: They all seem to live to taunt and antagonize the nation to which they’ve been sent, only to then act aggrieved and confused about the residents of that country not appreciating the trolling. Pete Hoekstra, a former GOP congressman and prominent Trump stooge before he was made the U.S. ambassador to Canada, has had a chance to see this all first-hand during his tenure as an American representative in the Great White North, but still acts as if the hatred he’s generated north of the border comes as a surprise. Who would have thought that spending a few years telling Canadians you want to annex their country into the “51st state” would piss a few Canucks off? Or in this case, more than “a few,” given that more than 200,000 Canadian residents have now signed a new petition instructing the country’s Parliament to banish Hoekstra from Canada entirely.
Said document is a petition to the House of Commons, and it’s not just purely symbolic: A mere 500 signatures are legally required on such a document to bring it to the floor of the legislature for discussion, and as of this morning, this one “initiated by Leanne Walker from Calgary, Alberta” has a rather more impressive 209,734 signatories. Those hundreds of thousands of people request that Parliament invoke the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to “formally declare Pete Hoekstra persona non grata and request his removal,” while also creating a parliamentary committee that would “review U.S. diplomatic interference in Canadian domestic affairs.” You know, the kind of typical stuff you’d expect to see in any legislative session of the country that was our closest and nearest ally for the entire last century until Donald Trump returned to office in 2025.
After boycotting American products and shunning vacations south of the border, Canadians are pouring their incandescent anger at the U.S. into a new cause: ousting the American ambassador.
More than 190,000 have signed a petition calling for the removal of Pete Hoekstra.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1.bsky.social) 4:30 PM · Aug 16, 2026
More specifically, the petition alleges that Hoekstra has “repeatedly made public statements undermining the Canada-U.S. diplomatic relations,” including seeming efforts to repeat Trump’s references to Canada as the “51st state,” normalizing language that Canada sees as a veiled threat against its sovereignty. The petition likewise accuses Hoekstra of knowingly boosting (and then denying involvement) far-right wing splinter groups such as the Centurion Project, which pushes for secession of Alberta as a Canadian province, and generally being a huge fucking hypocrite. Or as the petition puts it: “Ambassador Hoekstra has accused Canada of interfering in U.S. domestic politics while himself making repeated interventions in Canadian political discourse inconsistent with diplomatic protocol.”
This has seemingly been Hoekstra’s game in Canada since the beginning, and is an extension of his same behavior as a previous U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, where he also hosted events for far-right, anti-immigrant Dutch political parties. In Canada, meanwhile, he has garnered a constant parade of objection and negative headlines for choices such as inviting far-right activist Tamara Lich to a July 4 party at the ambassador’s official residence, after Lich was convicted and sentenced to house arrest after organizing the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers that crippled the streets of Ottawa for weeks. Hoekstra has likewise pretended not to understand why any Canadian resident would be upset by Trump’s threats to simply absorb our northern neighbor into the U.S.–when asked he could understand why residents of Canada would find this so upsetting or repellent, Hoekstra said the following: “Here, I’ll just get myself in trouble. I go around the country and people will say, ‘Pete, you just don’t understand why we’re so mad about the 51st state.’ Yeah, you’re right. I don’t.” I’m sure he would react in exactly the same way if Canada’s leaders said they would like to simply annex Montana, or his home state of Michigan.
🚨SEND PETE HOEKSTRA PACKING🚨
200K+ Canadians have signed the petition calling for U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra to be declared persona non grata and be expelled. This is an unbelievable response. The petition is open until Novevember 18.
🔗 Petition e-7531: www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en…
— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) 4:57 PM · Aug 16, 2026
It truly is incredible, meanwhile, how thoroughly and quickly the second Trump administration has managed to sabotage and eviscerate positive associations that residents of Canada have for the U.S., that have stood the test of time up to this point—not just for decades, but centuries. A Pew survey published in June found that prior to Trump returning to office, 82% of Canadians described the United States as a “reliable partner.” A few years later, that number is now merely 35%, a number that seems to dovetail quite closely with Trump’s own cratering approval rating, and can perhaps be understood as a measure of his far-right support in Canada.
Economic data bears this all out, illustrating how Trump’s tariff threats and trade war have devastated industries on both sides of the border, whether that is Canadian auto assembly plants relying on parts crossing the border, or U.S. homebuilders who have seen costs skyrocket thanks to more expensive Canadian lumber. To zero in on a particular industry near and dear to our hearts–American beverage alcohol–the loss of Canadian markets that have aggressively boycotted U.S. wine and spirits for nationalist reasons has only accelerated the extreme hardships faced by American distillers and vineyard operators at a time when those industries are hanging by a thread. As I put it not long ago, writing about American wine in particular:
A recent report from trade group The Wine Institute, using U.S. Census Bureau data, concluded that the American wine industry lost approximately $357 million in export revenue to Canada alone in 2025, or a 78% reduction from the amount of American wine that was exported to Canada in 2024, amid distributors choosing not to stock American products and a stunningly successful “Buy Canadian Instead” campaign for consumers. Which is to say, all American wine exports to Canada are now basically a fifth of what they were only a year prior. And oh, Canada was the single largest export market for American-made wine. The report describes this single factor as “the most catastrophic single-year trade disruption in the history of U.S. wine exports.” Seems bad.
A very significant number of Canadians have even stopped visiting our country as tourists! According to the same Pew survey, Canadian recreational visits to the country have declined by more than a quarter in just the past year. That is a huge tourism decrease, with all the connected economic fallout you would expect.
“Visits to the US from Canada are down 25.2%, year to date, with a 37% year-over-year drop in arrivals by car in July alone, according to Tourism Economics.”
Overseas tourism is down 10%
Florida reports “640,000 Canadians, down 20%
2.3 million overseas visitors, up 11.4%
Your thoughts?
— Canadianroots (@shannonpeel.bsky.social) 10:38 AM · Aug 30, 2025
It is likely that this petition to expel ambassador Hoekstra will end up being put forward for debate during the fall session of the Canadian Parliament by Elizabeth May, the leader of Canada’s left wing eco-party, the Green Party. It could theoretically result in Hoekstra being “summoned” by the Canadian government, effectively called to appear as a diplomatic representative to be either publicly or informally censured. The country has never actually expelled a U.S. ambassador before, and one rather doubts that most of the Canadian legislature would have the stomach for symbolically provoking Trump by banishing one of his favored underlings. But hey, if he keeps threatening insane, 50% tariffs for the dumbest reasons imaginable, who can say what kind of metaphorical middle fingers Canada might be ready to deploy?
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