09/13/2026
I wrote about this months ago before Carney leapt at his opportunity. This is going to be painful for us all (except Carney) , and for no good reason.
https://www.facebook.com/AndersonScott.ca/posts/pfbid023Gn61hWpyTNc7eMusbGTwguZtkzuLL1o2s6GoMV6Ngq5jSNmaoqj2ynexT84SLBBl
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Mark Carney’s Audacious Bid to Make Canada an ‘Associate Member’ of the EU
As trade talks with the U.S. collapse, prime minister pursues a major—and risky—pivot to Europe; an Ottawa book club plays its part
Drew Hinshaw
in Ottawa,
Joe Parkinson
in Brussels and
Laurence Norman
in Berlin
Sept. 12, 2026
WSJ
Shortly after Canada and America became embroiled in the worst bilateral trade war in their modern history, the secure phones of Europe’s top leaders lit up with a trans-Atlantic call. Mark Carney was pushing to take Canada’s relationship with the EU to the next level—a bold gambit to rewire the economic cabling of the Western alliance.
For months, the Canadian prime minister had held private conversations with almost every major European leader—from France to Italy, Germany and Scandinavia and even some of the continent’s lesser-known royals—on how to more deeply plug Canada and its 41 million people into Europe’s 27-nation club.
Now, Carney was accelerating Canada’s pivot to Europe, matchmaking a shotgun marriage to offset the pain of its divorce with America. In effect, a threat to make Canada the 51st state is pushing America’s northern neighbor so close to Europe that leaders have begun to half-in-jest dub it the EU’s newest member.
Carney has instructed his special envoy to Europe to scope out the most ambitious possibilities short of full membership in the EU or its common market, according to people familiar with the matter. The details are still being sketched by technical working groups for what the prime minister has told his aides will be the reorienting of an economy and a society that for half a century has been dominated by the U.S.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Council President António Costa join hands during the 20th EU-Canada summit last year.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Council President António Costa join hands during the 20th EU-Canada summit last year. OLIVIER matthys/epA/shutterstock
To European leaders, Carney has even suggested Canada take on a new title: “Associate Member of the European Union.” The EU, not known for its flexible enforcement of membership rules, is open to the idea, officials from both sides say.
Alongside Carney’s established emissaries are informal advisers drawn from the worlds of finance and politics. Some are fellow members of a Book Club in Ottawa that he no longer has time to attend, who quip that they abide by the code of the movie “Fight Club”: “The first rule of Book Club,” several told the Journal, “is you do not talk about Book Club.”
The result of the monthslong talks: European and Canadian officials are eyeing ways in which Canada could informally lock into Europe’s $21 trillion single market in strategic supply chains such as energy, AI, the critical minerals needed for batteries or semiconductors and, most urgently, defense.
In practice, Canadian goods, services and workers for those industries could eventually move frictionlessly between Europe and America’s northern neighbor, blurring the lines of where the EU’s economic borders end. In conversations with France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, speaks to Carney often, the idea has even come up to allow Canadians to live and work in Europe visa-free, two officials familiar with those discussions said.
The two sides are talking about laying underwater cables to link Europe and Canada, and jointly constructing data centers, cloud storage and new satellite networks beyond the reach of American tech giants. Carney is pushing to lay the pipelines Canada needs to redirect gas—normally pumped across the U.S. border—to European allies still struggling to replace Russian energy. Icebreakers, in his vision, would clear an Arctic path for Canadian fertilizer to sail east, over the Northwest Passage that lured centuries of explorers into the Polar sea.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, and Finland President Alexander Stubb participate in a hockey practice earlier this year.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, and Finland President Alexander Stubb participate in a hockey practice earlier this year. Spencer Colby/CP/AP
Canada and the EU are looking to intertwine research institutions to create a network of scientific output to compete with the U.S. university system. Carney is pressing to join the EU’s study-abroad program, as well, hoping a generation of Europeans and Canadians will attend university in each other’s homelands.
The full scope of the talks, often mired in technical details like European rules-of-origin codes, has barely registered in the White House. But it adds up to one of the world’s most significant—and risky—reactions to the second Trump presidency. Canada ships two-thirds of its exports across the world’s longest land border. The two countries have been twin pillars of the economic, geostrategic alliance called the West, and the White House is wagering their interdependencies will drag Canada back to the negotiating table, concessions in hand.
Carney—who studied in Europe, met his wife in the U.K. and ran the Bank of England for seven years—is placing a counter-bet that he can shift the country once known as British North America back toward the Old Continent.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada was the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 51st state of the United States?” asked Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who speaks regularly with Carney.
Any new alliance faces potential stumbling blocks. Although Carney is hugely popular for now, his domestic standing could erode as Canadians absorb the full consequences of a realignment. Wrangling with separatists in Alberta and Quebec, Ottawa might bristle at relinquishing any sovereignty to link into the EU. Countries whose firms have full access to the bloc’s single market pay into the EU budget, accept its workers and follow its regulations. Moreover, Europe would be hard-pressed to substitute for the southbound trade once heralded by Nafta, with an economy growing at half the pace of America’s.
“As the U.S. is reducing its role as the global consumer of last resort, it is not clear that either Canada or the EU are ready to take up that mantle to absorb each other’s production,” said a U.S. official.
In private discussions, some of Europe’s most senior officials have worried about grounding Carney’s ambitions to reality. Ten European countries have yet to ratify a previous trade agreement with Canada reached a decade ago.
In their meetings, EU officials have tried to probe whether their Canadian visitors are using them as props in counter-negotiations with Washington. Scarred by Brexit, they can’t offer Carney terms so generous that other members think of leaving and demanding a Canada-style arrangement.
Still, some European officials are starting to see the Maple Leaf nation as a test of whether their famously bureaucratic union can offer new, more malleable terms of inclusion for like-minded democracies looking for reliable partners. Earlier this week, senior EU officials debriefed European ambassadors in the glass-paneled Brussels office tower popularly known as “the Space Egg.” The message: If talks succeed, Canada will become closer than any other country outside Europe.
On Thursday, Carney will address the European Parliament to flesh out his vision to link up with Europe. The two sides will announce a number of new working groups at a bilateral summit soon after to try to turn ideas into concrete projects.
Wall Street Journal reporters spoke to officials from a dozen different governments involved in those conversations, who broadly described a prime minister whose ambitions—to make Canada European again, some joked—go beyond what Carney has publicly detailed. While there are multiple hurdles to dance around, European officials envision major Canadian companies could effectively lock in as single market suppliers for decades to come. Though officials stress they are hiding nothing from the White House, they share a new wariness toward the U.S. and its tech giants: Some on both sides have quietly stopped using U.S. platforms like Gmail or WhatsApp.
“This is tectonic change by working groups and bureaucracy. It’s terribly unsexy but terribly consequential nonetheless,” said one Canadian official involved in the talks.
Canada’s pivot to Europe is a back-to-the-future moment for a country that traded more with Europe than America on the eve of World War II. Its oldest citizens grew up as British subjects, its anglophones reading English literature like John Buchan, the Scottish novelist who became Canada’s 15th governor general. French Canadians, of course, had their own particular links to Europe.
“In those days, Canadians could be on Monday, Wednesday and Friday North Americans, the other days of the week they could be part of the British network of nations and benefit from both,” said Norman Hillmer, one of the leading scholars on North American relations.
Canada emerged from the war into a new world order of global trade shaped around the economic powerhouse of America. While Britain and Europe focused on rebuilding their shattered economies and shed far-off empires, Canadian business looked south, influenced by the dynamic consumer culture and the lure of the dollar. By 1950, 65% of Canada’s exports went to America; just 15% went to the U.K.
American colleges became incubators of a new Canadian elite, whose parents had attended British universities; by the late 60s, those campuses also fostered a Vietnam-era counterculture that was skeptical of American power.
The tractor-beam of Americanization was briefly interrupted when Richard Nixon imposed 10% tariffs on all imports—to stabilize the dollar after the end of the gold standard. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded by pledging to increase trade with the European common market and its newest member, the U.K. It bore little fruit, and was eclipsed entirely when his conservative successor, Brian Mulroney won the 1984 election and began working with Ronald Reagan on what would evolve into Nafta. Canadians skeptical of integrating North America’s two largest economies wore pins that read “51st state: Mulroney for Governor.”
Nafta transformed Canadian society. As the country welcomed the new millennium, ties to Europe had faded, especially as a new crop of immigrant Canadians arrived from Asia and the Caribbean. On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, America’s economy was integrating so fast with its neighbors that several U.S. state legislatures felt compelled to pass resolutions opposing a “North American Union” with a single, Euro-style currency.
That year, the Bank of Canada appointed a new governor, 42-year-old Mark Carney, who had emerged from both shores of the trans-Atlantic elite, graduating from Harvard and meeting his British wife at Oxford, where both played ice hockey.
The bruising recession that followed left the central banker convinced the global economy had become too dependent on the U.S. and its reserve currency. As governor of the Bank of England, he advocated for medium-size countries to find, or invent, a dollar alternative. London by then was extracting itself from the EU, an ironic crash course in European bureaucracy for a technocrat now trying to lead Canada the other way.
When Carney ran for prime minister, his Liberal party had been in power for 10 years and he faced a 25-point deficit in the polls. It turned around almost immediately after Trump began threatening to turn Canada into the 51st state.
Last week, Trump posted an AI-generated image of him standing over Carney with a hockey stick and a speech bubble saying “get up Governor!” Carney has defined the strains in bilateral relations as “a rupture, not a transition,” warning Canadians the profound political shifts unleashed by Trump are likely to outlast his term.
It “is the end of history for more than 100 years of close American-Canadian cooperation,” Hillmer said.
Carney, right, is greeted by Emmanuel Macron, President of France, during the June 15 G-7 summit.
Carney, right, is greeted by Emmanuel Macron, President of France, during the June 15 G-7 summit. Christopher Katsarov/CP/AP
Other fish in the sea
Within days of taking office Carney’s team began to map the deals that the U.K., Norway, Switzerland and post-Soviet nation of Georgia had with the EU, short of full membership. They made a list of 36 functions nations perform for each other—passing along intelligence, or sharing regulations—and ticked the categories where Europe and Canada could do more together.
In conversations with European leaders he’d known as a central banker, Carney was workshopping proposals to deepen ties that were far ahead of most European officials. New ideas were flowing from conversations with members of his Book Club, the clique of senior figures in business and politics bonding over the short novels they had time to read.
Many had lived in Europe, as students at Oxford or the London School of Economics, and had come to know each other when their children attended the same schools and summer camps. One Book Club member described the prime minister’s geopolitics using a dating metaphor: “Canadians should realize there are more fish in the sea than the United States.”
But when Carney appointed Canada’s special prime ministerial envoy to Europe, the veteran diplomat John Hannaford, last October, it took more than two months before EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen appointed his counterpart, a Dutch 30-year veteran of the Commission, Joost Korte. Several European leaders, including Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, were worried about provoking the U.S., European and Canadian officials said.
Two events—President Trump’s effort to gain control of Greenland and his war on Iran—jolted more European leaders to share Carney’s logic and urgency. Already speaking regularly to Stubb, Macron and Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Støre, the Canadian leader also began lobbying more Trump-friendly leaders, including Meloni. Early on, she was cautious about antagonizing Trump. After the president posted an AI-generated image of himself as pope in May, then claimed Meloni had begged him for a picture together, she changed tack. She now speaks to Carney more often than Trump, European officials said.
By summer, Canadian and European officials were accelerating their discussions in a proliferating number of diplomatic backchannels. On the sidelines of the preliminary meetings for the G-7, in the French city of Toulouse, Canadian officials and their European counterparts sketched out what they called “11 stack items” for deepening collaboration and reducing dependence on American technologies, defense equipment and trade.
Ahead of the G-7 leaders meeting in Evian, France, Carney met Macron in Paris and French officials came away floored by how fast the Canadians wanted to move. “Things suddenly accelerated to full-scale cooperation on many, many policies,” said a French diplomat.
Carney was by now speaking frequently with Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whom he knew from his time in banking, as the pair completed negotiations for Canada’s $25 billion purchase of German submarines.
In July, at the Ankara NATO summit, the leaders showcased the agreement in front of a meter-long mock-up of the submarine that German officials had flown into the Turkish capital wrapped in a protective cover that one official said resembled an Egyptian sarcophagus. When a photographer pointed out the model to the leaders, Carney quipped that “we didn’t notice it because of the advanced stealth characteristics” of the vessel.
After Carney’s somber press conference to explain the breakdown of U.S. talks and accuse Washington of moving the goal posts at the last minute, Merz reached out to the Canadian leader.
As Trump was signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” Canadian diplomats were in Berlin for a day of meetings on defense cooperation.
“This is Canada turning from looking at itself as a North American nation to a trans-Atlantic nation,” said a senior Canadian official. “Canadians, we sound like Americans, we dress like Americans, but as a society we’re much more European.”
Crisis as Opportunity: Why Europe?
Mark Carney didn’t create the crisis with Donald Trump, but he certainly appears to have seen an opportunity and used it to move Canada in a direction he already wanted to go. According to an obviously PMO-fed two-part article in the Globe and Mail, he is now openly pivoting Canada toward Europe, both economically and strategically. It is a mistake we may live to regret.
Long before Trump returned to the White House, Carney argued that governments, financial markets, and international organizations needed to work together to solve big problems like financial instability, climate change, and economic transition. In other words, his instinct has always been to go big and centralize. Even his book ‘Values’ posited that major crises create opportunities to reshape economies and institutions by top-down centralization. Whether the crisis was the financial collapse of 2008, COVID-19, or climate change, Carney’s answer has historically been largely the same: governments should take a larger role, private capital should be guided toward public goals, and international cooperation should become deeper.
Intellectually Carney is a liberal internationalist, a believer that rules and international law are virtually sufficient in and of themselves to serve as both the structure and backbone of a world order. He’s certainly not alone in that belief…the postwar world wrapped itself in a sea of conventions, treaties, and laws, beginning with the United Nations and Canada’s contributions to the Charter, in the fervent belief that written words and learned conventions make war impossible. With understandings all around, bound together by tangles of red tape and reams of treaties, the postwar international system would, in theory, be impossible to untangle in something as unthinkably gauche as war. Unfortunately, no one has taken the time to read Norman Angell’s “The Great Illusion,” arguing that European war had become unlikely in part because the colonial world was too economically integrated. The book was written in 1909 and he was proven embarrassingly incorrect five years later.
This paradigm of rational internationalism is nonetheless a fiction embraced by postwar European leaders, who choose to ignore the fact that American hard power secured the long pax Americana. When they scoff at the episodic peripheral American-led wars that secured the past 80 years of a rules-based world order in a nuclear world, it is because they have forgotten that a mere two or three generations ago European hard power projection was itself the backbone of international law and rules-based trading, such as it was. European leaders clapped for Carney at Davos because he said things out loud that diverted attention away from the unhappy strategic reality they had created for themselves, He allowed them to cast the blame overseas.
Trump didn’t cause Carney to pivot toward Europe; Carney used Trump as the excuse to do what he wanted to do in the first place. Just as Trudeau used the pandemic to “build back better” by restricting freedoms and tightening a stranglehold on the economy in the name of climate change, so Carney is using Trump to accelerate those restrictions and pivot toward the soft authoritarian, climate-conscious, managed stagnation of western Europe. Notably, Europe is increasingly led by leaders with oligarchic or high finance roots.
Once Trump began talking about tariffs, annexation, and reducing American commitments overseas, Carney had a politically powerful argument for doing something he already wanted to do anyway. Instead of saying Canada should move closer to Europe because it fit his long-standing worldview, he could argue that Canada had no choice but to “diversify.” European integration became not simply a trading partner but a supposed strategic necessity.
There’s nothing wrong with expanding trade and defence cooperation with Europe. Canada should have diversified our energy sales west and east over a decade ago as Harper wanted, and there’s nothing wrong and everything right about guarding our national resources. But that’s not what we’re doing…according to the Globe and Mail. Carney appears to be using a temporary political problem in Washington to justify a permanent change in Canada's strategic and economic posture.
Ironically, recent European history itself demonstrates why Carney's approach should make Canadians nervous. For decades, European governments allowed their military capabilities to decline because they knew the United States maintained western European defence through NATO and America's nuclear and conventional umbrella. Today many European leaders openly admit that they should have invested far more in their own defence years ago because now they’re scrambling to rebuild military capacity.
That should be a warning to Canada, not an enticement to make the same mistake. If Europe now regrets becoming too dependent on faraway North America for its security, why would Canada respond by becoming more dependent on faraway Europe?
Our answer to Trump should be the opposite. Canada should become stronger at home. We should modernize NORAD, strengthen our national military, secure the Arctic under the Canadian flag, build pipelines east and west, develop our natural resources, expand trade (but not security arrangements) with Asia, including China, and make ourselves more valuable to the United States rather than trying to distance ourselves from it.
Canada's geography hasn’t changed because Donald Trump was elected. Our largest trading partner is the United States by orders of magnitude, and our integrated supply chains are North American. Our energy infrastructure still points south, thanks to the same Liberals who now claim to want to do now what Conservatives wanted to do over a decade ago, and our mutual defence is fully integrated, to Canada’s immense benefit.
In fact, our most existentially important fact of integration is that our continental defence depends on NORAD and that cannot change. We cannot adequately defend ourselves alone against modern aerospace or undersea threats and because of that stark and unalterable fact, our warning systems, satellites, radar networks, command structures, and air defence are all deeply integrated with the United States through NORAD. Europe cannot replace that geographic relationship, no matter how politically close Canada becomes to Brussels.
But here’s the real fly in Carney’s ointment: Trump’s term ends in two years, and there is no obvious successor waiting in the American wings with anything close to his unpredictable antics and international showmanship. Even before he leaves, the American political landscape may change significantly in the 2026 midterm elections. It’s impossible to imagine the state of our relations with the US reverting to the somnolence of the pre-Trump era, but until we know what comes next, building a multi-generational strategy around what may prove to be a two-more- year disruption is impossible to justify. At minimum it will make it harder for the next administration to normalize relations and at worse it threatens to turn the American people – as distinct from the current president - against us.
Carney may very well force on us a long-term solution for a short-term problem, and one that leaves we Canadians in a more expensive world, strategically isolated, facing increasingly retributory tariffs from the US, and with a significantly lower standard of per capita living. Except for the corporations, who will certainly benefit from Carney’s bald and obvious crony capitalism, because all the borrowed money is being centrally allocated to whomever the PMO wishes. If corruption doesn’t gallop through this plan in the future, the perception of it certainly will.
If it is not yet necessary to make our lives and the lives of our children poorer, why are we doing it?
More importantly, despite obnoxious Trumpian trial-balloon 51st state rhetoric, the United States is not Canada's enemy. If we want to look around for enemies, China is the obvious adversary, with a government system utterly foreign to Canadian sensibilities of freedom and individualism, and actively committing what is euphemistically called “grey zone warfare” or “pre-kinetic warfare” against us as this is written. When there are intentional intrusions into our northern waters and airspace, they are Russian or Chinese, because China now considers itself an “Arctic nation.”
Carney said "if we're not at the table, we're on the menu" in what may be the expression of a sincere belief that the mere existence of rules may bind the hands of hegemons. Of course they will do no such thing, as is abundantly clear and demonstrably obvious from a quick glance at the geostrategic map today. Certainly any military moves by this imaginary middle power muddle to actually enforce its “rule-based system” will be a red flag to hegemons in an international system currently in a state very much like the international tinderbox of the late 1930s, with our very own 21st century European test-ground precursor war, then in Spain with tactical and strategic air war, now in Ukraine with autonomous weapons.
It seems an awful lot like Carney's response to Trump is the acceleration of a project already planned. His background, his writing, his speeches, and his policy choices all point in the same direction: a fantasy of replacing US hegemony with a matrix of “rules” similar to the giant ball of red tape that is the EU, presumably enforced by a circumstantial hodgepodge alliance of middle powers. Prime Minister Carney is engaging in magical thinking here. Anyone familiar with alliance dynamics and history knows how utterly ineffective such a force would be. Just ask General Roméo Dallaire about that, and the disaster he was subjected to didn’t even involve pitched combat.
Trump may be difficult, but America is not our enemy. We Canadians can cross the US border and they can cross ours and we do so all the time despite the media narrative from the likes of CBC et. al. The United States remains Canada's closest ally, our largest customer, our biggest investor, and our partner in defending North America. We share a culture (as much as that miffs some folks in the upper nose-sniffing, self-appointed social media intelligencia), and we share a political ethos. We have coexisted on friendly terms for over 200 years and there is no reason we can’t for another 200.
We should separate the crisis from the response. Donald Trump is difficult to deal with and inflammatory in the speech department to be sure, but reshaping Canada's strategic future because of two more years of Trump is something entirely different. We should prudently plan for contingencies, but Carney wants an impossible permanent answer to what is, in historical terms, a temporary political instant. I personally have no desire to trade two more years of Trumpian boorishness for 100 years of the Byzantine machinations of Brussels.
