Mark Slapinski - July 21, 2026


Hoekstra EMBARASSED By Canadian Journalist On Live TV


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

178.09

Word count

1,542

Sentence count

65

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with the Canadian ambassador to the United States, Pete Hoekstra, to discuss the current trade tensions between Canada and the US, and why there may be some hesitation in Canada's approach to economic diversification.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The American ambassador to Canada was asked a question he simply could not answer during an
00:00:04.620 interview on Canadian television. When a reporter asked Pete Huckstra about some of the comments
00:00:09.720 American President Donald Trump made towards Canada, he struggled to respond with a coherent
00:00:14.880 answer. Canada and America, they have officially been in a trade war since Donald Trump returned
00:00:19.560 to the White House back in late 2024. Trump announced he was putting tariffs on both Canada
00:00:24.640 and Mexico due to fentanyl, even though the majority of the substance comes from Mexico.
00:00:30.000 Now the trade deal between Canada, Mexico, and the United States is up for review.
00:00:34.100 Canadian journalist Vashti Capello has publicly questioned Trump's comments
00:00:37.600 towards Canada, causing Hoekstra to give a wordy non-answer. Let's take a look at that.
00:00:42.260 The table's almost set for immediate investment and growth and jobs and prosperity in a whole
00:00:50.460 series of areas without even looking out at where else can we cooperate. There's been talk about
00:00:57.940 the Arctic. We're waiting, OK, on this in terms of, you know, is Canada, does Canada want to do
00:01:04.660 the Arctic by itself, defend the Arctic? There have been, you know, there have been statements
00:01:08.460 to that effect. Can you understand why I think, you know, a number of years ago, what you're
00:01:14.100 laying out would have made perfect sense to Canadians, right? Deepening integration in the
00:01:18.200 areas that matter most, particularly from a continental perspective. And in fact, that's
00:01:23.300 what has occurred over so many years but in the course of the last you know year and a half
00:01:28.800 the hesitation that you are describing is likely the genesis of you know comments and actions by
00:01:36.520 the administration and by the president himself canada only works as a state we don't need
00:01:40.500 anything they have as a state it would be one of the great states anyway canada is totally dependent
00:01:44.580 on the united states without us canada can't make it if we stop buying their products canada would
00:01:48.960 cease to exist as a country. If someone spoke to the United States that way, would you be advocating
00:01:53.820 for deeper integration or would you too have some hesitance? We would take a look at our business
00:01:59.060 community, where we're doing well. We wouldn't go to our largest trading partner and say there's a
00:02:06.040 rupture and we're actually going to be looking somewhere else. You wouldn't do that if someone
00:02:12.180 Let me finish.
00:02:13.620 Pardon me, go ahead.
00:02:14.000 Yeah, okay.
00:02:14.440 We would take a look at that and we'd say, okay, let's see exactly what we can develop,
00:02:22.840 what kind of agreements we can develop.
00:02:25.660 And obviously we would take a look at going to alternative sources.
00:02:30.120 But Canadians are smart people, okay?
00:02:33.180 You have smart business people.
00:02:35.520 They have been looking at diversification for years and decades.
00:02:39.960 This is not a brilliant new idea.
00:02:42.180 that says, wow, let's sell to Europe, let's sell to Asia, okay?
00:02:47.920 That's not a great insight.
00:02:50.140 What they found, and I've spent a lot of time with your business community,
00:02:55.860 they have found that doing business in Europe is not easy.
00:03:01.500 It is hard, okay? 0.77
00:03:03.540 The French like to buy from the Germans, they like to buy from the Dutch, 0.99
00:03:06.240 and they like to buy from the Spaniards and all those types of things.
00:03:08.780 you know maybe they uh maybe they would like to buy some canadian but it's not their first
00:03:15.580 place where they go so diversification this is for your economist to figure out
00:03:23.500 how fast it can happen and those types of things but i think it's hard but i would never take your
00:03:30.020 biggest customer we would never have taken our biggest customer um and just thrown them under
00:03:34.840 the bus and say, sorry, we're out of here. But doesn't, do you understand how that's exactly
00:03:38.920 how it felt to Canadians? And I know you, you, you push back against this, but we were your
00:03:43.880 biggest customer. Let's talk about business. Okay. How are you going to create jobs and
00:03:50.180 prosperity for your people? We do business with people that don't say the nicest things about
00:03:55.440 America. All right. And, you know, we do business. We, you know, the amazing thing is a lot of
00:04:02.760 Canadian business are still looking at expanding into the US. You know what? There's a lot of
00:04:07.920 American businesses that would love to do business in Canada, even though you ban our products. You
00:04:14.440 know, we can't we can't bid on procurement and those types of things. I have questioned many
00:04:21.060 federal ministers about the efforts to diversify the challenges previously and the challenges that
00:04:28.820 presents right now. But you framed the initial comment there around taking issue with the fact
00:04:37.220 that it's being described as a rupture. But you want us to refer to the comments from the president,
00:04:43.220 for example, or the way in which he's described this country as simply noise. I'm presenting to
00:04:48.420 you just like when you're wondering why there might be some hesitation not to further integration
00:04:53.460 or make that sales pitch in the way you describe it, that that perhaps is part of it,
00:04:58.740 that part of the responsibility and the onus, the burden of that lies not just with Canada,
00:05:04.000 but specifically with the president who decided to take aim at your close friend and neighbor.
00:05:08.320 We did not take aim at Canada.
00:05:10.420 Those statements are not taking aim, with all due respect, Ambassador?
00:05:14.000 Take a look at your economic.
00:05:19.680 We put tariffs on every country in the world.
00:05:23.900 We did not take aim at Canada.
00:05:25.700 We took a policy that we were implementing on a global basis that we believed we had to put in place to keep America strong and prosperous.
00:05:35.860 So, you know, there were only two countries that responded in a strongly negative way.
00:05:41.600 okay the the rest of the world we've negotiated trade agreements we've worked we've worked on
00:05:48.000 frameworks and those types of things we did not take aim at canada really and and i ask with
00:05:56.680 great respect because yes you did apply tariffs to other countries but you initially applied 232
00:06:01.320 fentanyl associated tariffs to canada and wherein the president you know did not refer to every
00:06:07.440 other country in the way that, as I cataloged, he has referred to Canada. I understand that
00:06:12.860 you're upset with the response that Canada made. I'm not upset. I'm not upset. It doesn't bother
00:06:16.520 me. Okay, you don't view the response from Canada positively. But from where I sit,
00:06:21.180 it seems like you're frustrated with the idea that when Canada got punched, they didn't just
00:06:25.520 lay there. Pete Hoekstra has asked a question he can't answer. And he can't answer because he knows
00:06:32.020 his boss is an idiot. He keeps trying to change the conversation because he can't address Trump's 1.00
00:06:37.060 comments about making Canada the 51st state. Trump's trade policies towards Canada are
00:06:42.080 unjustified, and Trump's administration will try everything to gaslight or deflect when asked about
00:06:47.080 them. Hoekstra and these other clowns will always admit the fact that it was Trump that signed the 0.84
00:06:51.500 current trade deal with Canada. And it was Trump that arbitrarily violated that trade deal in his 0.88
00:06:56.440 second term due to the imaginary threat of fentanyl. Not only did he violate the trade deal,
00:07:01.760 Trump also talked about making Canada the 51st state. This is what you would expect from an
00:07:06.000 enemy, not your closest friend and trading partner. I believe that Canadian Prime Minister
00:07:10.720 Mark Carney is not interested in making a trade deal and is simply waiting for Trump to leave
00:07:16.020 office. Trump's poll numbers are terrible and he's likely going to lose the midterms.
00:07:21.040 Once he loses, the Democrats will likely impeach him and there will be another president in the
00:07:26.180 next year. There is no point in signing a trade deal with Trump because he has shown repeatedly
00:07:31.160 he isn't interested in making one. And even if Canada signs another trade deal with America,
00:07:35.400 trump's likely to go back on it anyway you can't make a deal with someone who's as untrustworthy
00:07:40.300 as trump it's better to wait until he's out of office canada will be better off getting everything
00:07:45.380 in order and then negotiating a new deal with a new administration a lot of right-wing podcasters
00:07:50.800 take trump's side on everything but this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole
00:07:56.280 situation it's also deceptive and hurtful to the conservative movement one of the reasons i moved
00:08:01.720 away from conservatives is because they have a weird fascination with trump they either worship
00:08:07.080 him or they think he's completely innocent or irrelevant when it comes to canadian politics
00:08:12.520 trump made a huge mistake by picking a fight with canada his administration knows but they'll never
00:08:18.040 admit it because they care more about their jobs than they do about being honest carney is handling
00:08:23.080 this the best he can even if you don't like him you can't deny that this is the biggest issue
00:08:28.600 canada is facing right now and carney he's the man for the moment any canadian that supports
00:08:33.880 trump at this point is either seriously misinformed or they're a grifter that is spreading lies to 0.75
00:08:38.420 make an easy buck 0.99