U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra has told a closed-door meeting in Ottawa that Canada could be blamed if key races in next Tuesday's midterm elections go against President Donald Trump and the Republicans, according to sources with knowledge of the discussions.
The message was delivered on Tuesday at a private business lunch hosted at the ambassador's official residence in Ottawa. The sources said Hoekstra expressly mentioned the races in Michigan and Maine, two states the Republicans need to win if they are to hold on to the U.S. Senate. He told the business crowd that if those states fall to the Democrats, life will likely get more difficult for Canada after the midterms, because the president will not be happy, and Canada could be blamed.
The lunch was an off-the-record event, and the sources were not authorized to disclose what was said, which is why they are not being identified. No recording of the remarks has been reported; what is known of them comes from people with knowledge of the discussion. The ambassador himself has not confirmed the wording attributed to him.
The U.S. embassy responded that the "reported comments are grossly taken out of context from a broader discussion," but it declined to say what that broader context was. "The ambassador has consistently said that the Canadian media is attempting to overstate the relevance of Canadian issues in American elections. As we have previously stated, Americans will decide American elections based on issues that are important to them," an embassy spokesperson said. Beth Burke, the chief executive of the Canadian American Business Council, which helped organize the lunch, also said the comments were being taken out of context. She noted the event was meant to be off the record and said: "The ambassador spoke very positively about the U.S.-Canada relationship and his hopes that a deal will be reached."
The warning did not come out of nowhere. For weeks, Hoekstra has been saying publicly that Washington is watching Canadian politicians closely ahead of the November 3 vote and that Canadian moves aimed at American politics could cross the line into election interference. On a podcast appearance earlier this month, he warned Canada to "keep your nose out" of American politics and pointed to Canadian ministers talking openly about targeting tariffs at politically sensitive states. "We see all of that. We are monitoring it. We are evaluating it. And if some of it becomes election interference, America will respond to it," he said. He also named Ontario's anti-tariff advertising campaign, which used the voice of Ronald Reagan speaking against tariffs, as the kind of government-funded political advertising Washington objects to; after those ads ran last year, trade talks between the two countries broke off. On October 21, the U.S. embassy in Ottawa went further and published a formal fact sheet setting out its concerns about Canadian activities in U.S. politics.
Others in the administration have made the same point in harder language. Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro warned last month: "That game is up and if you interfere in our elections in Maine or Michigan, you will pay even more dearly." Prime Minister Mark Carney has rejected the interference accusations, saying they have no merit, and his government says advocating for Canadian businesses and challenging American tariffs is ordinary diplomacy between two countries that trade hundreds of billions of dollars with each other every year. Asked whether Canada could be blamed for Republican losses in the midterms and face additional tariffs, Carney said he did not expect that to happen. "There have been a very broad range of justifications for U.S. tariffs, and there's almost an industry to create justifications for them," he said. The State Department, asked about the embassy's fact sheet, said only: "The embassy fact sheet speaks for itself." Ottawa, for its part, has quietly told its own diplomats in the United States to avoid meetings and events involving midterm candidates, so that Canada cannot be seen to take sides.
The two states Hoekstra named are exactly where the trade fight is already an election issue. The president's tariffs on Canadian products are a live question in border states and beyond, and on Friday Trump reversed some tariffs affecting Maine in a bid to save Senator Susan Collins' re-election bid. In Michigan, the Republican Senate candidate, Mike Rogers, is campaigning against the tariffs. Hoekstra knows those states personally: he represented Michigan in Congress for 18 years. The wider picture, with less than a week to the vote, is tight — as of Tuesday, the non-partisan Cook Political Report rated the House as leaning to the Democrats and the Senate as a toss-up.
At the same time, the two governments are talking. Trade discussions intensified over the last week, and Ottawa believes the political pressure created by the midterms has produced an opening. In public this week, Hoekstra has struck a warmer tone: at a business council event on Monday he said the United States wants to get to a deal "as soon as possible," and suggested that by this time next year the same crowd could be toasting the relationship with Kentucky bourbon. On Tuesday, the embassy posted a video of Hoekstra at his residence with Canada's ambassador to the U.S., Mark Wiseman, at a tree-planting ceremony — the tree one of 250 Ottawa gifted the United States for its 250th anniversary.
For ordinary people on both sides of the border, the stakes are concrete. For American voters, the embassy's own position is the simple one: Americans will decide American elections. Washington's argument is that it is one thing for a neighbour to defend its industries and another for its politicians to speak and act in ways aimed at particular American races — and that if that line is crossed, there will be consequences for the relationship. For Canadians, the ambassador's private warning means that a bad night for Republicans next Tuesday could be laid at Ottawa's door, with the trade deal that Canadian jobs depend on caught in the fallout. And for Americans in Michigan, Maine and other border states, the same trade fight at the centre of this dispute is the one already deciding prices in stores and orders in factories. Which way those states vote on Tuesday will say a great deal about where the relationship goes next.
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