OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly welcomed president-elect Donald Trump's pick for the next U.S. ambassador in Ottawa, a former longtime Michigan congressional representative who voted for NAFTA and later wavered on new free trade deals.
The minister was in Washington to talk trade and security with U.S. senators from both parties. Her meeting schedule included top Republican senators Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott and Lisa Murkowski. Former Canadian diplomat Colin Robertson, who has met with Hoekstra before, said he's someone Canada can work with.
Hoekstra was a nine-term border-state lawmaker and holds high esteem in Trump's world. His long career in politics left a wake of stunning headlines, including for a 2012 Super Bowl ad critics and even some Republicans slammed as blatantly racist. In a 2019 public talk organized by a Dutch news magazine, he said it's"not an unrealistic ask" that every member of NATO meets the target of spending the equivalent of two per cent of GDP on defence by 2024 — something Trump has railed about, and something Canada will not do until at least 2032. At an event in Ottawa last month, Trump's former ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft said his administration would expect Canada to meet that target much sooner than 2032.
By 2003, he was opposed to inking free-trade deals, including two proposed with Singapore and Chile, saying that NAFTA led to manufacturers in Michigan to"shift production to Canada and Mexico." Nearly a decade later, in 2011, he singled out NAFTA as something that had"come to symbolize what Americans believe is unfair trade."