NWT Premier RJ Simpson will host United States ambassador Pete Hoekstra later this week, the territorial government says.
A record of ministerial meetings planned for the week, published on Monday, states that Simpson and cabinet colleague Caroline Wawzonek “will be meeting with the Honourable Pete Hoekstra, Ambassador of the United States to Canada, on September 28 in Yellowknife.”
No further detail about Sunday’s planned meeting or the remainder of Hoekstra’s apparent visit was immediately available.
Hoekstra, nominated to his current role by President Donald Trump late last year and confirmed as the US ambassador to Canada in April, has been touring Atlantic Canada in recent days.
He most recently made national headlines by telling a Halifax event he had been disappointed that it is “very, very difficult to find Canadians who are passionate about the American-Canadian relationship.”
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”You ran a campaign where it was anti-American,” he was quoted as saying by the CBC. “That was an anti-American campaign. That has continued. That’s disappointing.”
The NWT, like the rest of Canada, has sought to distance itself from American products and services as a response to US-introduced tariffs earlier this year.
In March, Simpson took a clear position, declaring “we’re going to resist” when asked in the legislature about the extraordinary US shift on trade and Trump’s assertions that Canada should be the 51st state.
“We don’t want the Americans to be able to use economic force or coercion to weaken our federation to the point that, you know, we are at risk of annexation. And frankly, I don’t see that happening. I can’t imagine a world where the Americans are in control of Canada,” Simpson said in response to questions from Range Lake MLA Kieran Testart.
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“It’s just not something that I think anyone, any of us, can fathom. It doesn’t mean that we won’t need to protect against that possibility, and we as Canadians might have to put up with some pain based on these tariffs.
“It might be a difficult few years for us, but I know that we stay united and we’re going to resist.”
The NWT and other jurisdictions attempted earlier this year to rid their liquor store shelves of American products and cancel contracts with Elon Musk’s satellite internet provider, Starlink.
Billionaire Musk was a central figure in Trump’s government at the time, a situation that has since changed. The tariff picture has also evolved in the intervening months, while the NWT has said it is struggling to find an alternative to Starlink.
An Ipsos poll published in the wake of Hoekstra’s Halifax comments, sampling the views of 2,000 Canadians, reported that 60 percent agreed with the statement: “We can never trust the Americans the same way again.”
Only 16 percent disagreed, and the figures were broadly similar no matter the area of Canada surveyed. The North, as is almost always the case in such professional polling, was excluded.
