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Colby Cosh: Based on Hoekstra's definition, I'm a foreign election-interferer

I confess my crime. Let the drone strike come though the heavens fall

Do you suppose I’m guilty of intervening in a foreign election? I would never have thought so, but earlier this week the American ambassador to Canada went on a Canadian podcast to warn against Canadian “interference” in U.S. midterm elections. The example that got up Pete Hoekstra’s nose furthest was apparently the Ontario government’s October 2025 Ronald Reagan-themed television ad, which ran for two weeks on the four “major” U.S. broadcast networks and ESPN’s postseason baseball coverage.

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The ad was nothing more than a (harmlessly edited) 1987 quotation from a radio editorial delivered by President Reagan. Viewers were made emphatically aware that the spot was paid for by Ontario. It accurately expressed Reagan’s core beliefs, in Reagan’s own voice, about the virtue and importance of international free trade. If the ad had quoted almost any other historic statesman, listeners would be safe in assuming that it had been written by someone else, possibly for ephemeral reasons of partisan advantage. But this is Reagan, and that wasn’t his style:........

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