HANNAFORD: Why would Canada seek closer ties with a struggling Europe?

Informed that the European Union (EU) had no interest in having Canada as an associate member, I confess I was through the five stages of grief before I reached the end of the sentence.What middle-power fantasy had ever possessed our minds that a formal relationship with a culture that has lost its way would ever seem attractive to four Canadians out of five polled?Buy their cheese, sell them maple syrup, by all means. But we’re already doing that.But, dear heavens, the Europeans are in bigger financial trouble than we are, have less control over their borders even than we do, and — as US President Donald Trump has observed — are happy to leave their defence to other people — i.e., the US.Let’s not kid ourselves. Sign a paper agreement in front of the photographers, call the relationship whatever you want — and so far we can’t even agree on that — but know this: if Canada ever needed help confronting a threat in its Arctic, Europe would give it all the help that Canada offered Europe in Ukraine.Then there was a suggestion of a youth mobility agreement. You’re thinking, “That will make it easier for nice French au pair girls to visit and look after your children.” Possibly.It would also make it easier for the people currently tearing Paris and Rome apart to do the same thing here. Does nobody in the Government of Canada read the newspapers?Mercifully, the Europeans took a look at us and politely demurred. And so, the Montreal summit that opened on October 29 is producing exactly the outcome that should have been obvious on September 16, when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen looked across the European Parliament chamber at Prime Minister Mark Carney and invited Canada to become the EU’s first “associate member”..Puzzlingly, she still uses the term herself. However, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, and others promptly refused to put the phrase in the draft joint declaration, and as of October 30, it does not appear there, whatever term von der Leyen uses for the Montreal conference.There is no such status in the EU treaties, and manifestly key players were not prepared to invent one. What remains is the deliberately empty formula of an “ever closer association … short of full membership itself”, with the hard work of defining what that means deferred until 2027.Carney has said the label does not matter, only the substance. In that, he is correct. Let us look at the substance.Thanks to the last Conservative government’s negotiations, Canada already has a free-trade agreement with the EU. It has been applied provisionally since September 21, 2017. Roughly ten member states, including France and Italy, have still not fully ratified it. We can afford to be patient; the EU only takes about 5% or 6% of Canadian merchandise exports. The US takes about 70%. Canada supplies about 1% of what the EU imports. Those numbers have not been invented by the US. They are the product of geography, supply chains, and the fact that Europeans have not, on the whole, been beating down the door for more Canadian goods once the existing tariffs came off.What the Europeans have actually put on the table is narrower. Canada is already inside the i (SAFE) defence-procurement scheme. There is talk of European Investment Bank money for critical minerals projects, a feasibility study on Canadian LNG shipments, some digital and cable work, and the youth mobility idea already noted.Useful in places, perhaps. But none of it replaces the American market or rewrites the basic arithmetic. A bank study on LNG is not a long-term offtake contract. Access to a European defence fund is not a substitute for NORAD. And a mobility scheme that makes it easier for people to move between jurisdictions that cannot keep order in their own capitals is not an unalloyed blessing.The people arguing for the pivot say the point is resilience, not replacement. With Trump imposing tariffs and occasionally talking about the fifty-first state, it is prudent to have options. Shared democratic values matter. Critical minerals and energy give Canada something Europe wants. Even a watered-down association is better than nothing, and the concrete projects will matter more than the title. There is something to that. Diversification is not a bad habit, and no one should pretend the US is an easy partner at the moment.But the November 2028 election will determine the next dispensation in Washington.Meanwhile, options are not substitutes, and as noted above, Europe is a curious place to go looking for a more stable, solvent, or competent partner..Furthermore, Europe's debt loads are far from modest, and its energy policy has been a running experiment in self-harm. Border controls remain a matter of public controversy even in countries that pretend otherwise, while their defence spending has long relied on an American umbrella that Trump keeps threatening to fold, leaving them without the capacity to manufacture many vital military supplies. To top it off, senior officials still do not even know what to call their relationship with Canada.If the argument is that American fiscal problems — debt held by the public exceeds 100% of GDP — make a European hedge look wiser, the reply is straightforward: Europe has its own fiscal, demographic, and strategic problems, and it is farther away. A country whose economy is wired into the North American market does not improve its position by pretending the wiring can be casually rerouted to a partner that has declined to give the relationship a name.The middle-power language Carney has used since his acclaimed speech in Davos is the kind of thing that sounds statesmanlike — in a speech.But the moment anyone asks what it costs and what it delivers, it sounds thin. Completing ratification and implementation of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, selling LNG where there is actual demand, and developing minerals projects that can find buyers are ordinary commercial tasks. Inventing an associate membership that the most important European nations do not wish to grant, while soft-pedalling the practical difficulties of deeper regulatory alignment on dairy, telecoms, and everything else, is something else.It is the hope that a grand label will do the work that trade, investment, and geography have not done.Europe is circling the drain, but at least it has done Canada this service. By refusing so far to put “associate member” in the draft joint declaration — replacing it with the empty formula of an “ever closer association … short of full membership itself” — it made clear the distinction between what sounds statesmanlike in a speech and the practical difficulties of deeper regulatory alignment. A grand label will not do the work that trade, investment, and geography have not done. It separated the aspirational branding from any concrete, treaty-based, or commercially meaningful advance. The rest — whether Ottawa treats the outcome as a prompt to focus on those ordinary commercial tasks or continues to treat the label as the goal — is up to Ottawa.Ottawa’s job is now either to out-wait Trump or, better still, if strategic development is the plan, to actually start digging.

HANNAFORD: Why would Canada seek closer ties with a struggling Europe?

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