Canada should sell to more customers. Albertans have said so for decades and Ottawa did not listen. Closer ties with Europe are welcome. Eight things about this week’s European turn are not.
How does a country become more sovereign by joining a union that makes rules but cannot vote on them? Prime Minister Mark Carney told the European Parliament this week that Canada will.
Ursula von der Leyen offered the title of “first associate member” the day before, and he welcomed it, then said at his press conference that the term was hers. But the term has no substance yet. No treaty article defines an associate member, no text sets out what Canada would take on or give up, and the two sides have agreed only to “define together” what the words mean. The sovereignty he promised rests, for now, on an aspiration with a name. The question is how it could ever work.
Start with what nobody disputes. Canada sells roughly seven of every ten export dollars to one customer, and that customer has spent almost two years proving it will use the fact against us. Albertans have been saying this since Quebec and BC blocked new pipelines to tidewater. Ottawa treated the complaint as a regional grievance, killed Northern Gateway, let Energy East die, and bought Trans Mountain only after its owner gave up. If the federal government has finally discovered that Canada needs more customers, the West welcomes the conversion, however late. Closer ties with Europe are part of any sensible answer; Europe is wealthy, democratic, and already bound to us by a trade agreement. Its future, however, is questionable.
The argument rests on emotional primacy and the claim that a closer embrace makes Canada freer.
Eight things about that claim do not add up.
The first is the use of the word sovereignty. Mark Carney used it six times in Strasbourg. He defined it as a country’s ability to make its own choices without being dictated to. Then he listed what he wants from Europe: common standards for artificial intelligence, pooled computing power, an integrated market for financial services, membership in European research and student programmes, alignment on energy and digital rules. How much of that requires Canada to follow rules made by institutions in which it has no seat and no vote? Members surrender powers and get a vote in return. A non-member who follows the rules gets the obligations without the empowering vote.
At Davos in January, Carney had a phrase for accommodating a hegemon. He called it “the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Everyone understood which hegemon he meant. The sentence today fits Brussels without changing a word.
The second is the title. Ursula von der Leyen offered Canada the chance to become “the first associate member of the EU.” Carney said that the substance matters; the substance has a name. The Union’s treaty provides, in Article 217, for agreements “establishing an association” with outside countries. Turkey has had one since 1963 and is still in the antechamber; nobody with an association agreement is a member. The adjective in von der Leyen’s sentence is inaccurate. It describes an old arrangement.
The third is where the word associate comes from. Official Canada has spent a decade repudiating colonialism: the 2008 parliamentary apology, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Justin Trudeau accepting the word genocide, a new citizenship oath, the Vimy Memorial removed from the passport, Canada Day cancelled in city halls, names changed, and statues pulled down.
Now the same official Canada seeks its independence in the embrace of a project founded by colonial powers, with the development of their colonies written into its birth certificate. The Treaty of Rome of 1957 devoted a whole chapter, Part Four, to “the Association of Overseas Countries and Territories,” meaning the colonies of France, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, from the Congo to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, twenty-five kilometres off Newfoundland.
That chapter is where the word “association” enters the Union’s law. It survives as Articles 198 to 204, and its annex still lists Greenland and Saint-Pierre. Canada would be the third North American party to an association with Brussels; the other two hold the word under the colonial chapter.
On Sunday (September 20) the Prime Minister flies to Saint-Pierre, French colonial territory a short boat ride from the Burin Peninsula, to affirm sovereignty beside President Macron, whose country, let me remind you again, has not ratified CETA. Nobody in Ottawa seems to have looked up St.-Pierre’s address.
Ottawa claims to fight second-hand colonialism at home but embraces it in the splendour of colonial metropoleis.
The fourth is the absurdity of such company given their decolonizing rhetoric. The states that wrote Part Four and still carry it did not run gentle empires. Belgium’s King Leopold II secured recognition of his personal rule over the Congo in 1885, during the Berlin Conference, and ran it on rubber quotas enforced by the severed hand until Belgium took it over in 1908; the dead are counted in the millions.
France conquered Algeria in 1830, massacred thousands at Sétif on the day Europe celebrated victory in 1945, and fought an eight-year war of torture and reprisal before leaving in 1962. And let us not forget Saint-Domingue, France's abominable slave colony. Its slaves freed themselves and founded Haiti, the first republic of their kind. France then made them pay for that freedom: 150 million gold francs, demanded in 1825 under the guns of a French fleet and reduced to ninety million in 1838. Haiti borrowed the money from French banks and was still repaying it in 1947.
None of these states is disqualified from trade by its past; every one of them is a democracy Canada should deal with.
But Ottawa has told Canadians for a decade that a country’s colonial past measures its standing. By that measure, the club it has been invited to associate with fails at the door.
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The fifth is the deal we already have. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) was signed in 2016 and has been provisionally in force since 2017. Nine years later, ten of the twenty-seven member states still have not ratified it, including France and Italy, and the French Senate voted it down two years ago by 211 to 44 (vive la fraternite franco-canadienne!).
The Union offers a status it has not invented, while it has not finished approving the deal it signed with this country. Canada has been associated to Pillar II of the EU’s Horizon research programme since July 2024, paying a contribution set by the size of our economy, under a regulation stating that association “does not confer on the third country any decision-making power.” Carney asked on Thursday for more of the same: Erasmus and the next Horizon. Those are membership fees for non-members.
The sixth is energy and climate. Carney told Strasbourg that Canada would offer Europe its energy “in every form the transition requires,” and he named climate change first among the storms the alliance is meant to weather. In 2011, the European Commission proposed labelling Alberta oil sands crude as dirtier than every other source, penalizing it for every fuel supplier in the Union; Alberta fought for three years before Brussels backed down in 2014.
Two years earlier, the Union restricted seal products, wrecking Inuit markets despite an exemption on paper, and the World Trade Organization upheld its moral rationale while finding the regime discriminatory. The regulatory instinct Alberta has spent fifteen years fighting in Brussels is the one an associate absorbs as law. A country that wants to sell more oil and gas to the world does not begin by binding its energy rules to the bloc that tried to keep its oil out.
The seventh is the man making the case. As Governor of the Bank of England in May 2016, Carney warned Britons that leaving the European Union could mean recession, a falling pound and slower growth. Britons left anyway, mostly because they wanted laws made at home, which is an assertion of sovereignty. Carney now proposes that Canada travel the same road the other way, citing sovereignty as the reason. If laws made at home were reason enough for Britain to leave, what makes rules made in Brussels a gain in sovereignty for Canada?
The eighth is the unseemly needy tone. Why must every trade relationship this government pursues arrive dressed as something more? In Beijing in January, Carney announced a “strategic partnership” for a new world order with a one-party state that held two Canadians hostage for a thousand days, penetrated the Winnipeg microbiology lab and counts agents among MPs and senators. Four days later, at Davos, Carney told the world the old order was not coming back. In Strasbourg this week, he spoke of roots, of acorns carried home from Vimy (the place Ottawa erased from passports), of an affinity “elective, chosen, and renewed,” and von der Leyen answered with the language of family.
A trade agreement is a contract between parties: it sets tariffs, rules of origin and a dispute panel, and either side can walk away from it. That freedom to walk away is what sovereignty means in practice (ask the United States). A government that describes each new customer as a partner, each partnership as a homecoming, and each homecoming as sovereignty seems to want to belong badly. Diversification means many customers and no exclusive loyalty. It’s business, but instead Ottawa is displaying the unseemly psychology of a jilted party everywhere it goes.
The customers Canada needs are in Asia, the Gulf, Latin America and, yes, Europe, and reaching them means building the ports, pipelines and terminals that get Canadian goods to tidewater. Selling more to Europe requires none of the things Carney asked for in Strasbourg; it requires using the agreement we already have and a way to ship.
Diversification is the right goal. Canadian goods need markets. A title of subordination from Brussels is not a market.
“The regulatory instinct Alberta has spent fifteen years fighting in Brussels is the one an associate absorbs as law. A country that wants to sell more oil and gas to the world does not begin by binding its energy rules to the bloc that tried to keep its oil out.”
This is a brilliant paragraph, in a stellar essay.
I posted on another site that I have heard many benefits of EU association, but I have heard mentioned none of the responsibilities.
We know that a subsidized, Liberal adjacent media will obsequiously and gratuitously support Mr. Carney, whether or not it is his ill-timed Trade War, or his ill-advised foray into the European regulatory state.
What we don’t know, is how does this initiative positively affect any of the ten greatest concerns afflicting Canadians today?
Canada suffers from an investment and production deficit; how does this strategic partnership allay those problems? Not generally, but specifically.
Great essay; this was a disturbing pleasure to read. What a splendid observation.
Terrifically well thought out, Sir!
You point out so, so many contradictions and flaws in MC's push to Europe and, quite frankly, I expect that push to continue and the contradictions and flaws to simply be ignored, particularly by our mainstream media who are long since purchased and paid for.