What If Canada Joined the E.U.?

The heated rhetoric has infuriated and astonished most Canadians; in a recent poll, seventy-six per cent supported the decision of the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, to walk away from trade talks with Washington. In a speech on Saturday, Carney said that the Trump Administration expected concessions that would “compromise Canada’s sovereignty”—including moves that would harm critical manufacturing industries and even, according to Carney, undermine French language and cultural protections in Canada. “We cannot control the storm blowing in from Washington,” Carney said, but added that the country “can chart a new course” by “diversifying our trading relationships abroad.”

And so we return to the question of the European Union. Ever since Trump’s combustive, combative second term began, a conversation once consigned to academic circles and the parlor rooms of Brussels and Ottawa has entered the mainstream: forget being the fifty-first U.S. state—what if Canada became the twenty-eighth member of the E.U.? A widely read column in The Economist from January, 2src25, laid out the case: Canada’s huge territory and abundant natural resources offered a complement to the crammed, resource-sparse European continent; Canada’s social-welfare state and social-democratic foundations dovetailed well with the values and practices of European democracies; Canada’s vast Arctic border with Russia presented obvious shared strategic interests; and, perhaps most pertinent, an upgraded Canadian-European alliance would be a useful hedge against the uncertainty posed by a bullying Trump and an increasingly unpredictable United States.

Kalypso Nicolaïdis, a Franco-Greek professor of international affairs at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, has advocated for Canadian accession into the bloc for almost two decades; she believes that Canadian entry would engender a stronger, more “unbound” E.U., grounded not in geography but in principles. “The arguments at the time have become even stronger thanks to Trump,” she told me. “If you cannot change your neighbor geographically, change it institutionally.” Bruno Maçães, a public intellectual and a former Portuguese politician, intends to stump for Canada’s E.U. entry at a conference in Calgary next month. “Canadian full sovereignty may well need a radical economic shift away from the U.S.,” he told me, adding that the E.U. “looks increasingly unsustainable without access to raw materials and energy, and access on sustainable and secure terms.” (Canada and Europe do share a nominal land border—a kilometre-long track on a barren island in the high Arctic, in the icy strait that runs between Greenland, which is part of Denmark, and Canada’s northernmost territory of Nunavut.)

The idea has gained ground on both sides of the Atlantic. A poll of Canadians conducted in March found that almost half the respondents would support joining the E.U., with only twenty-eight per cent against it. In Europe, various prominent officials are keen: the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, floated Canada as a candidate for accession earlier this year; the Finnish President, Alexander Stubb, on a trip to visit Carney in Ottawa, said that Canada’s membership in the European Union “would be a marriage made in heaven,” a process of integration, he seemed to suggest, as logical as his own country’s recent entry into the NATO military alliance. Joachim Streit, a liberal German member of the European Parliament, launched a campaign last year to get the European Commission to revise an ornery article in its founding treaty stipulating that membership in the bloc be available only to “European” states. Sigmar Gabriel, a former German Foreign Minister, declared that “Canada is more European than some members of the European Union.” Next year, Canada will even have an entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest.

To be sure, Canada is nowhere close to actually joining the European Union. The E.U. has not initiated any process to consider the North American country’s accession, and nobody in the Canadian government—including Carney, a Europhile—has raised the matter formally. Canadians may be intellectually curious about the prospect of E.U. membership and angry at Trump’s America—which, according to a recent Pew poll, they now view more negatively than they do China—but they may not be eager to accept the sweeping transformation of their country’s laws and regulations that E.U. membership would entail. The process would create an even more severe disruption of relations with the U.S., including the scrapping of existing trade treaties and the imposition of a strict customs operation at the border. Ratification of Canada as a new member, by all of the E.U.’s twenty-seven member states, is hardly assured; ten have yet even to ratify the bloc’s existing free-trade agreement with Canada, which went into effect almost a decade ago.