Prime Minister Mark Carney is heading to Strasbourg as Canada and the European Union prepare a sweeping new partnership. He will attend European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address on September 16 and address the European Parliament the following day.Recent reports suggest the arrangement could cover trade, defence, strategic supply chains, critical minerals, science, technology, and space. One Canadian official described the government as considering “virtually everything short of formal EU membership.” The details remain unpublished, but Ottawa has not hesitated to celebrate the agreement in advance: announce the historic partnership, pose beside the flags, and leave the practical political and economic consequences for later.There is nothing wrong with selling more Canadian products to Europe. We should sell Alberta oil, natural gas, grain, beef, fertilizer, petrochemicals, and technology wherever customers will buy them. But expanding European trade is entirely different from pretending Europe could replace the US as Canada’s principal economic partner.Carney’s government has already established the Strategic Partnership of the Future, signed a security and defence partnership, and made Canada the first non-European participant in the EU’s Security Action for Europe initiative. While I am certainly not in favour of sending my sons to bleed on any potential European battlefield (of which there are many), these arrangements may create legitimate opportunities for Canadian defence, aerospace, and technology companies. The concern begins when sensible cooperation becomes a plan to reposition Canada away from the US and into an imagined transatlantic bloc.This is beginning to look less like Canadian foreign policy than the personal renovation project of one lifelong Davos insider. Carney is a former World Economic Forum board trustee who used his 2026 Davos address to urge middle powers to build a new international order. He is now trying to turn that worldview into Canadian policy before the proposed EU arrangement has even been published, debated by Parliament, or put before Canadians for approval. No election was fought on transferring Canada’s economic centre of gravity across the Atlantic, but apparently, the country no longer requires public consent for a generational change in direction. One internationally connected technocrat has had a vision, Brussels has supplied the flags, and the rest of us may eventually be permitted to read the terms..But geography still matters. In 2025, the US purchased 72% of Canada’s merchandise exports, down from 76% in 2024. Even after that decline, the relationship remained several times larger than Canada’s trade with the entire EU, which accounted for only 7.9% of Canada’s total merchandise trade in 2024. The export figures and EU share show the scale plainly.Canada and the EU reported $178.6 billion in total goods-and-services trade in 2025. That bilateral trade is substantial and worth expanding. But calling the EU Canada’s second-largest trading partner can obscure the gap. It is like calling the runner who finishes three laps behind the winner the second-fastest man on the track: technically correct, but incomplete, and actually, disingenuous. Canada would have to increase exports to Europe several times over merely to approach the present American market. Even that understates the problem because trade is not a collection of interchangeable boxes that a ministerial announcement can redirect.Canada and the US share a continent, thousands of kilometres of border, pipelines, railways, highways, electrical grids, and integrated manufacturing networks. Goods can leave an Alberta plant in the morning and reach an American customer without crossing an ocean. Europe requires ports, ships, terminals, longer delivery times, and, for Alberta, transportation across another province before the product reaches salt water.No one has yet informed Canada’s ruling elite that Brussels cannot be moved to Montana.The danger is particularly serious for Alberta. In 2025, the province exported approximately $151.5 billion in goods to the US. These Alberta exports show that America is not simply one customer among many; it is the market around which much of Alberta’s export infrastructure has been built..American refineries are configured to process heavy Canadian crude, delivered directly by pipeline into the world’s largest integrated energy market. Europe has neither comparable connections nor an equivalent concentration of refineries designed around Alberta bitumen.I am old enough to remember Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney singing together. Those were the days. But if this current version of Ottawa causes lasting damage to the US relationship, Alberta cannot simply redirect several million barrels a day to Rotterdam. Canada lacks sufficient eastbound pipeline and export capacity (as hard as we tried to build it), while Europe is reducing fossil-fuel consumption and attaching carbon costs and reporting requirements to imported industrial products.The EU’s carbon adjustment regime entered its definitive phase in 2026. It initially covers steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizer, hydrogen, and electricity, with pressure to broaden its reach. Alberta produces energy-intensive commodities, fertilizer, petrochemicals, and hydrocarbons. Closer policy alignment with Brussels could therefore add another layer of carbon accounting, environmental conditions, and industrial regulation to an economy already burdened by Ottawa’s emissions policies.Carney may call that regulatory harmonization. In Calgary, we might call it allowing foreign bureaucrats to help determine whether Alberta products are sufficiently virtuous to be sold. Deeper EU integration could also add a fourth layer of government above the municipal, provincial, and federal authorities Canadians already fund.The European Parliament is elected, but the European Commission, which proposes and enforces EU legislation, is not directly elected by the public. Canadians could therefore face policies shaped by commissioners and officials in Brussels whom we did not elect, cannot remove directly, and who have no particular obligation to Canada or Alberta.We already pay three levels of government to regulate nearly everything that moves. Carney apparently believes the missing ingredient is a fourth, located 7,000 kilometres away..Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) has already tested this entire proposition. Canada has had CETA since 2017. It removed tariffs from 98% of EU tariff lines, and bilateral merchandise trade increased. Yet after almost a decade of preferential access, the EU still accounts for a relatively small share of Canadian trade and recorded a €16-billion merchandise-trade surplus with Canada in 2025. The trade surplus reflects strong European sales of pharmaceuticals, machinery, vehicles, wines, and consumer goods, but does not suggest Europe is preparing to absorb anything close to the volume Canada sells to the US.CETA shows that European trade is useful, but also shows its limits. If eliminating almost every tariff did not make Europe a replacement for the American market, another partnership, summit, parliamentary speech, and group photograph will not perform that miracle.Carney is also embracing the EU even as its political direction becomes less predictable. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) recently won nearly 44% in the Saxony-Anhalt state election, its strongest state result. National polling now places the AfD near 28%, ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU in several surveys.The AfD opposes much of the EU’s direction, favours tighter immigration controls, and challenges European policies on Russia, Ukraine, and energy. Its rise does not mean Germany will leave the EU next week, but it does show a serious political revolt against policies Canada’s Laurentian establishment increasingly wants to imitate.That is the irony. Carney is sailing east to embrace centralized European governance as many European voters rebel against high energy costs, migration policy, climate mandates, and distant institutions. Ottawa appears eager to adopt yesterday’s European consensus while Europe itself is reconsidering it.A partnership spread across 27 countries must also navigate elections, coalition collapses, national vetoes, and competing industrial interests. French farmers will defend French agriculture, German manufacturers will defend German industry, and every government will protect its workers, energy supplies, and tax base. They are not assembling in Brussels to design a prosperity program for Grande Prairie..Diversification must supplement the American relationship, not become an excuse to weaken it. The US is the only market capable of purchasing Canadian energy and manufactured goods at anything close to their present scale, and the only major market connected to Alberta by existing pipelines, railways, highways, and electrical infrastructure.Carney’s European initiative may produce worthwhile contracts in defence, technology, and critical minerals. Take the contracts, sell the products, and cooperate where Canadian interests are served. But Canadians should reject any arrangement that imports EU climate rules, weakens sovereignty, discriminates against Alberta energy, or gives Ottawa an excuse to neglect the American relationship.For Alberta, the stakes are serious. Ottawa’s preferred industries may collect defence contracts and green-technology subsidies while Alberta absorbs lower energy sales, additional carbon restrictions, stranded infrastructure, and lost investment. Once again, Central Canada could enjoy the new arrangements while Alberta receives the invoice.The US cannot realistically be replaced as Canada’s dominant trading partner in five years, ten years, or even an entire generation. An ocean cannot be removed by policy, pipelines cannot be redirected through communiqués, and European demand cannot be manufactured in an Ottawa briefing room.If Carney wants more trade with Europe, fine. But trading with Europe and trading away America are different propositions. One is prudent diversification; the other is a costly economic miscalculation.Alberta should not sacrifice its future to another Laurentian geopolitical project. Our economy is overwhelmingly continental, our infrastructure runs north-south, and our natural commercial partner is the US. If Ottawa chooses Brussels bureaucracy over North American reality, Albertans may eventually face their own choice: remain within Canada’s trade strategy or become an independent country able to negotiate directly with the customers who buy what we produce.
