A man I know runs auto parts across the Ambassador Bridge. He has been doing it for twenty-three years — Detroit warehouse to Windsor stamping plant, back again before lunch. Not a lot of glory in it. Gets paid by the load. His wife teaches second grade. They raised three kids on those runs.
His life is harder now than it was two years ago, and not because anything changed about the way he does his job. What changed is that the people in charge of the relationship between his two countries decided his work was a lever instead of a living.
That is the context for the news that U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra invited Tamara Lich, who is under house arrest for leading the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests that shut down Ottawa and several border crossings, to the Fourth of July party at his residence on the Ottawa River. The State Department said Lich attended as a journalist, noting her contributor role at Rebel News. She posted online that she thanked Hoekstra for his support. More than 27,000 Canadians signed a parliamentary e-petition calling on their government to review the ambassador’s conduct and consider requesting his recall. Prime Minister Mark Carney ruled out expulsion. “We take the administration as it is,” he said.
The instinct is to treat this as one more provocation from one more loud American. That instinct is wrong, and I want to say why.
Hoekstra, a former Republican congressman from Michigan, arrived in Canada in April 2025. He has called Canada’s response to Trump’s fifty-first-state rhetoric “nasty” and “disappointing.” He demanded an apology from Canada’s national newspaper over a column about U.S. hockey players who attended the president’s congressional address. Ontario Premier Doug Ford publicly urged Hoekstra to apologize after the ambassador directed an expletive-laden tirade at a provincial official at a gala. Hosting a woman under house arrest for leading the protests that blockaded the crossings my friend drives every week was not a slip. It was a choice.
“I don’t think there has been anyone in the history of Canadian diplomacy who has been quite so outspoken and critical, openly critical, of Canadians and their government,” said Fen Osler Hampson of Carleton University. He is right. But the reason matters more than the record.
When Hoekstra was asked about it, he said, “I didn’t come here to be liked. I came here to represent the president of the United States and his agenda.”
Take that at face value. He is not going off the rails. He is on them. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who deals with him regularly, said of Hoekstra, “You know exactly where you stand with him.” That is not a compliment. It is a description of the policy. The fifty-first-state talk, the tariff escalation, the ambassadorial stunts — these are the same operation at different scales. The president’s rhetoric and the ambassador’s conduct are not in tension. They are in concert.
Now, a policy can be deliberate and still be destructive to the people who depend on what it breaks.
The two countries share the longest undefended border on earth. The North American auto industry runs on integrated supply chains that cross that border every day — parts stamped in Ontario, assembled in Michigan, shipped back to Ontario for final assembly, shipped south again for sale. Interrupt that circuit and you are not punishing a government. You are idling the line.
The people who feel it first are the ones I described at the top. The parts haulers who sit at the bridge while rules change underneath them. The families in Flint and Windsor and Oshawa and Lordstown who built their lives around a border that worked like a road instead of a wall. The small business owners in border towns who sell to customers on both sides and are now watching both sides pull back.
The cost has a number attached to it now. A Pew Research poll published on June 23, 2026 found that 35 percent of Canadians regard the United States as a reliable partner, down from 83 percent in 2022. Hoekstra called the number “a problem” and blamed a year of “anti-American messaging” by Canada’s political establishment. When asked whether the president’s fifty-first-state rhetoric might have something to do with it, and whether he had ever asked Trump to tone it down, Hoekstra said he would not “get into pointing the blame at anyone” and that Trump is “very effective in putting out his own messaging.” “We don’t tell the president what to say.”
Eighty-three to thirty-five in three years. I am a man who has watched a transmission fail in slow motion. You do not get to thirty-five percent trust in a neighbor by accident. You get there by spending it down, one provocation at a time, until the other party starts pricing the relationship as a risk instead of an asset.
And that is what Carney is doing. He is not expelling the ambassador. He is not matching provocation with provocation. He is doing something quieter and more consequential. He is reducing Canada’s dependence on the United States. Several provincial governments have already pulled American liquor from store shelves. Trade negotiations have stalled on the retaliatory tariffs. Canada is pursuing diversification deals that a year ago would have been politically unnecessary. The uncertainty hanging over the North American free-trade framework is accelerating that process, not slowing it.
What that means for my friend who runs parts across the bridge, and for the plant workers and small business owners on both sides, is that the ground is shifting under the supply chains their paychecks depend on. Not because the economics changed. Because the politics decided their livelihoods were expendable as a negotiating position.
Goldy Hyder, who runs the Business Council of Canada, first met the ambassador at a hockey playoff game. Hoekstra talked about how Canada had liberated his parents’ Dutch town from the Nazis. Hyder said he understood the emotion. There is nothing wrong with that story. There is something wrong with a policy that spends the goodwill a story like that earns on hosting a protest leader at a cocktail party while the bridge my friend depends on is getting harder to cross.
At the July Fourth party, Hoekstra told the crowd that the U.S. and Canada had “a few little issues to work out” and assured them “we’re going to get over this.” Then he closed with a joke: “Next year, hopefully we can all take a toast of American bourbon legally in the province of Ontario.”
That is a funny line. I have said funnier ones to customers waiting on brake jobs. But the people waiting on brake jobs in my shop did not build a policy that is dismantling the largest trading relationship on the continent. They did not host a woman under house arrest at a holiday party to make a point about who is in charge. They did not decide that a neighbor’s trust was a thing to be spent for cable-news segments and political rallies.
The ambassador is doing his job. The question is what his job is costing the people whose jobs depend on the border he is helping to break.