Ambassador non grata Pete Hoekstra is warning Canada not to interfere in the American elections following a year and a half of interfering in Canada’s internal affairs.
The United States embassy in Ottawa published “Fact Sheet: Monitoring Canadian Activities in U.S. Politics” this Wednesday, two days after Albertans forcefully rejected the United States’ unwanted moves on the province.
This ‘fact’ sheet attempts to demonstrate hypocrisy on the part of the Canadian government by quoting the Prime Minister saying we will not interfere in American elections, followed by several quotes and anecdotes from Canadian politicians meeting with Democrats and sharing reality with Americans.
Among the highlights is this gem:
FACT: On October 13, 2026, just three weeks before the U.S. midterms, Canadian Consul General Bernadette Jordan appeared with members of Congress from only one party: Democratic Representatives Becca Balint of Vermont and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts at a Vermont roundtable on U.S.–Canada trade tensions and the impact of tariffs. (Source: Rep. McGovern X post, October 13, 2026)
Meeting elected officials elsewhere is very much the job of our own elected officials. These are not partisan candidates, they are elected representatives. Moreover, what they fail to note is that the states of Vermont and Massachusetts only have Democrats in Congress, with the Republicans having failed to elect a single congressman or senator in the current legislature. The only way that a meeting involving those two states could have included an elected federal representative that was not a Democrat would have been to invite independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
If they added New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — the rest of the region known as New England — to that roundtable, they still would not have found a single Republican congressman to invite as there simply aren’t any.
The rest of the points in the fact sheet do not fare a lot better, with several quotes about industry minister Mélanie Joly doing… well, her job. The Republican administration in the United States has openly put pressure on Canada to bend to their will without any particular objective beyond the complete annexation of our country. The US president cites tariffs as good for his country, the path to national prosperity. Joly has openly acknowledged that our counter-tariff strategy targets areas in the United States that voted for tariffs by electing Republicans on that very promise.
If the American officials are accusing Canada of election interference by acquiescing to their principled position on the positive impact of tariffs, they may be admitting to their own dishonesty on the file with their voters. If tariffs are so good, then Canada also imposing them should clearly demonstrate to those Republican voters that they made the right choice.
More to the point, the American government has been actively interfering in Canadian politics and elections since Trump’s return to office. Since day one he has attacked our Prime Ministers by describing them successively as the governor of the 51st state. His team has reached out to make a separate agreement with Quebec aimed at dividing Canada and influencing the province’s elections and provided resources to the Alberta separatist movement through a referendum campaign.
If they are concerned about individual Canadians interfering in American elections, they might consider curtailing private citizens like Elon Musk who weighed in during last month’s Quebec election calling for the province to separate. That does not even touch the surface of the prolonged American social networks’ algorithmic efforts to prop up Canada’s far right, most visibly demonstrated through the disinformation-led Ottawa convoy.
Hoekstra himself invited Tamara Lich to the US embassy to celebrate July 4th as a personal guest of the American ambassador. She, as you may recall, is under house arrest for her role in that Ottawa convoy, which among other things called for the overthrow of Canada’s government — and was supported by MAGA-sympathetic Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. For the Americans to warn Canada about interference in their elections is, yet again, a confession about their own actions.
Their actions are not limited to Canada, of course. The American president has been explicitly calling for the removal of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy while enabling Russian military action against their country. They recent curtailed the Starlink StarShield service to Ukraine’s military to neuter Ukrainian defences against a major air raid while also reducing intelligence access for Ukraine, while cancelling sanctions against the aggressor country and offering Putin access to the American market for his oil, the primary means of funding that war. StarShield service was only restored yesterday, after more than a week of suppressing Ukrainian military capability.
The Americans made a commitment in 1994 to defend Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty in the Budapest memorandum. In it, the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine agreed that Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the collapsing Soviet Union in exchange for protection from military or economic coercion from the signatories. This is quite obviously not being followed by either Russia or the United States.
Canadians are rightly concerned about the results of the mid-terms. The current government of the United States has shown that its intentions toward Canada are similar to Russia’s intentions toward Ukraine, if not quite as far along the road, and that they are actively interfering with our domestic affairs
Whether stating that Republicans in this election are an existential military and economic threat to Canada counts as interference in their elections, I’ll let you decide.
