Hoekstra’s Big Pout Shows That Withstanding Trump Is Still Job #1

U.S. ambassador Pete Hoekstra's gaslighting about Trump's annexation talk isn't going well for him. But it shows how protecting Canada itself still belongs at the top of Mark Carney's agenda.

Sep 21, 2025

We will now observe a minute of silence in sympathy for poor Pete Hoekstra, Donald Trump’s long-suffering ambassador to Canada.

You get to decide whether your own silence is sarcastic or stunned.

Beginning before the MAGA regime’s return to the White House in January, we’ve seen a deluge of misinformation aimed at manufacturing U.S. resentment against Canada—America’s biggest trading partner, and sometimes to a fault its steadiest international ally, until now. We’ve been #ElbowsUp against Trump’s continuing claims that we would be so much better off if we just accepted annexation as a 51st U.S. state. All from a U.S. presidency that was bought and paid for by the oil and gas lobby.

So it was alarming yet somehow unsurprising last week when Hoekstra, whose previous gig was to offend everyone in sight as U.S. ambassador to The Netherlands during Trump’s first term, took the messaging and performative sense of grievance to a new level. Earlier this week, he told a Halifax Chamber of Commerce event that the most “unexpected” part of his latest job was the anti-American sentiment his boss has generated with his inflammatory rhetoric and economic terrorism.

"I'm disappointed that I came to Canada—a Canada that it is very, very difficult to find Canadians who are passionate about the American-Canadian relationship," Hoekstra said. "You ran a campaign where it was anti-American, elbows up, me too. You know, that was an anti-American campaign. That has continued. That's disappointing."

[Memo to Pete: We’re plenty passionate about the Canadian-American relationship. Just not in the way you seem to expect us to be.]

Pete Is Disappointed.

It took not very many minutes for Canadians to respond to Hoekstra’s epic pout.

“As I read and listened to U.S. Ambassador Hoekstra’s comments in Halifax yesterday, I reflected on the warning signs of abusive behaviour,” Sen. Colin Deacon (CSG-Nova Scotia) wrote Friday on LinkedIn.

“Countless Canadians have family, friends, past and present business partners, and investments in the U.S. For the majority of us, this remains unchanged,” he added. Trump and his minions, however, are a different story.

“Abusers work hard to hide their abuse and can often appear to be very likeable, even charming,” Deacon said. (Though I don’t think anyone would ever accuse Pete Hoekstra of being charming.) “But the warning signs of abusive behaviour, regardless of the type of relationship, are fairly easy to spot.”

Those signs include:

• Acting as if they own their partner;

• Lying to make themselves look good;

• Putting their partner down;

• Dominating conversations;

• Suggesting they are the victim;

• Isolating the victim.

At least one senior member of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Council on Canada-U.S. Relations wasn’t about to accept any of that.

"When you kick the dog, you can't blame it for snarling back," said Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association.

Hoekstra’s behaviour "is gaslighting 101," Volpe said. "You probably should get someone to tell him a little bit more about how to properly do Canada-U.S. diplomacy, but I'm not sure he'd listen."

At one point in his Halifax rant, Hoekstra tried to claim that Canada’s “relative position” has improved, since the arbitrary and punishing tariffs Trump has imposed on Canadian goods are lower than the even worse ones he’s levied on other countries. Volpe wasn’t having any.

I unfortunately only speak English and I don't understand what he's saying there,” he said. “Everybody was better off nine months ago, including Canada."

Trust the blazing satirists at The Beaverton to pick up the part that Hoekstra left unsaid.

“I’m disappointed that I came to Canada,” they had Hoekstra saying, emphasizing again that this quote is satire to be savoured, but not fact that was actually spoken out loud. “A Canada that it would be very easy to target with 500% steel tariffs, or one patriot missile aimed at Parliament Hill, I might add.”

The strong reaction was needed, and it was grand. But we should still be listening closely to what Hoekstra has to say, because what he says is what he means. Diplomats, even loose cannon, undiplomatic diplomats, rarely speak without purpose. And the remarks from Donald Trump’s emissary show us once again that withstanding an existential threat to our sovereignty is Job #1 for all of us.

Same as it’s ever been since Trump took office, and same as it’ll always be until we see solid evidence that we’re safe.

Our Next Reliable Trading Partner

Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México/wikimedia commons

As far back as the Liberal Party leadership campaign leading into the federal election in April, Carney has been saying that Canada’s “old relationship with the U.S. is over” and pledging to build closer connections with more “reliable” trading partners. This week, just as the Trump administration kicked off its mandated review of the 2020 trade agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., Carney and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced plans to cooperate more closely on trade, security, and energy.

Heading into a two-day visit to Mexico City, CBC said Carney had two goals: to work with his counterpart to preserve North American free trade, and to “develop a bilateral trading relationship with Mexico that operates independently of the whims of the White House, and can survive whatever fate lies in store” in upcoming negotiations among the three countries.

When the talking was all done, a communiqué from Carney’s office said the new Canada-Mexico Action Plan will:

• Prioritize the development of long-term infrastructure, including energy corridors;

• Create a new bilateral security dialogue to disrupt various forms of transnational organized crime;

• Build new investment opportunities, “from energy and infrastructure to critical minerals and agriculture”;

• Boost cooperation on climate and conservation.

In contrast to Carney’s visit to Berlin last month, where the top-line news was about (likely unrealistic) liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from Canada to Germany, the Canada-Mexico Action Plan sounds a lot like what you would expect from a meeting between a former IPCC climate scientist and a former UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. While the plan contains references to LNG and carbon capture and storage technology, it seems to focus mainly on shared priorities like:

• Renewable energy;

• Clean hydrogen;

• Methane certification;

• Energy efficiency;

• Smart grids;

• Electric mobility and mass transportation;

• Climate response in agriculture;

• Preservation of “biocultural heritage”;

• Water security;

• “Mineral resources needed to support the green transition.”

In a joint statement, Carney and Sheinbaum said they’d had a “very productive meeting”—language that shouldn’t be remarkable, except that it never would have been possible if Trump or his representatives had been in the room.

Getting From Here to There

And that’s the problem. For all the buzz lately that Carney has had his elbows down since taking office, the news from his trip to Mexico suggests the overall strategy may be working. But to get there—to deliver what they’ve both said they want to do—the two countries will have to cut through the reflexive intimidation and persistent misinformation from the likes of Pete Hoekstra and the mob boss president he represents.

And make no mistake: while every move Trump makes is calculated to boost his own ego and pocketbook, he’s the puppet of a U.S. fossil industry that paid the piper and is calling the tune. At this week’s Summit on Climate Mis/Disinformation at the University of Ottawa, climate diplomacy veteran Catherine Abreu traced the industry’s decades-long climate playbook—“deny, delay, distract”—right back to the hundreds of millions it spent to put Trump back in office.

“We need to defossilize information systems” after decades of allowing climate misinformation to flood in, Abreu said, citing a June, 2025 report from the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, that called for fossil disinformation to be criminalized. “We have to talk about the significant political leaders who are now in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry,” whose campaign donations to Trump far exceeded the higher-profile ones he received from Elon Musk.

[Disclosure: Catherine Abreu is chair of the Energy Mix Productions Development Committee.]

The ties go deeper still. In her excellent HEATED newsletter, U.S. climate journalist Emily Atkin revealed that the network built up by provocateur Charlie Kirk to pull college students into the MAGA fold was largely bankrolled by the U.S. fossil industry.

She wrote:

Turning Point USA, the group Kirk founded to ignite a culture war on college campuses, has managed to hide much of its funding sources. Roughly half of the group’s $40 million in income in 2020 came from 10 anonymous donors, NBC News reported.
But in 2017, Kirk admitted that some of the group’s anonymous donors “are in the fossil fuel space.” Speaking to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Kirk disclosed that he’d fundraised for TPUSA at the annual meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), as well as the 2017 board meeting of the National Mining Association.
In those meetings, Kirk promised oil and gas companies he’d fight “the myth that fossil fuels are dirty,” and target the “leftist professors” on college campuses who “perpetuated” the “myth.”
The meetings “went great,” Kirk told Mayer. The IPAA’s president, Barry Russell, wound up joining TPUSA’s advisory council, where he remains today. (Kirk had said that most advisory council members are also TPUSA donors).

Atkin added:

Over the next nine years, Kirk worked to chip away at young Americans’ rising concerns about climate change. He did this by claiming climate science is still debated—and then peddling the conspiracy theory that all climate policies are a Democratic bid for government control.
“A tyrant’s fantasy is to have a massive green economy transition,” he said in 2023. “You can get rid of private property, you can control people’s movements. It’s fundamentally the abolition of civilization as we know it.”

What Do We Even Do With This?

Pete Hoekstra’s Halifax rant, Charlie Kirk’s fossil industry allegiances, and two days of non-stop insights from the UOttawa misinformation summit all point back to one conclusion.

Mark Carney was elected with one job: to protect us from Trump. Job #2 was simple and succinct: If in doubt, refer back to Job #1. And now we’re seeing just how complicated and multi-layered that job is going to be.

It’s de rigueur these days for pundits, and more than a few climate hawks, to lament that the PM has taken his elbows down since he took office, that the one-time global voice for climate finance has forgotten everything he used to stand for. I don’t buy it.

Some of Mark Carney recent moves—the erosion of consultation processes and sidelining of Indigenous voices through the Building Canada Act, the early emphasis on LNG—deserve all the pushback they’re getting and more. And we still need to see the government emphasize the nation-building projects that will actually build the nation we want.

But it helps those arguments, rather than hurting them, to acknowledge that Carney is doing the job we gave him: managing a big, predatory, sociopathic complication that none of us asked for, and that won’t go away just because we’d rather ignore it. No government or elected official is entitled to a free pass, and that includes Carney. But if he doesn’t successfully deal with Trump, the question of how Canada should show up on climate change may well take a back seat to whether a sovereign Canada is able to show up at all.

We don’t have to like it. But it’s what we’ve got.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.