Canada’s drift toward Europe is all about Washington 

For the first time, more than half of Canadians say they support European Union membership — not as a protest vote, not as an abstract preference, but as a serious policy option. Washington has not noticed. 

Canada’s candidacy for EU membership is, on its face, a legal implausibility. EU treaties restrict membership to European states, which Canada is not. Accession requires unanimous agreement from 27 governments, each with its own domestic politics and its own reasons to stall. The process alone would consume a generation. So, the easy response is to wave it off — interesting hypothetical, no serious legs. 

But the debate is not really about EU membership: It is about Canadian strategic drift. And that is Washington’s problem, whether accession is on the table or not. 

Start with economics. The U.S.-Canada trading relationship is the largest on earth. The integration runs deep — not just in goods crossing the border but in supply chains built on the assumption that the two countries share a regulatory environment close enough to treat as a single productive space.

EU accession requires full adoption of the complete body of European law. That would pull Canadian regulations toward Brussels. It does not take a dramatic rupture to cause damage. Regulatory divergence at the margin, sustained over years, grinds away at industries — auto, energy, agriculture, manufacturing — that currently operate without thinking much about the border. They would start thinking about it. 

The case for membership rests largely on expanded market access. But Canada already has that. The EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade........

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