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Europe Isn’t a Quick Fix for Canada’s Trade Crisis

A partnership still needs twenty-seven countries to agree. And then there’s the ex to deal with

On the 30th of July 1903, in the heady days of a national economic boom, Sir Wilfrid Laurier rose before Parliament and made his case for a new national railway. “No, this is not a time for deliberation, this is a time for action,” he said. “We cannot wait, because at this moment there is a transformation going on in the conditions of our national life which it would be folly to ignore and a crime to overlook.” Prime Minister Mark Carney, you feel, would have been nodding along.

81 percent of Canadians are in favour of closer ties with Europe

Most critical EU decisions rely on unanimity, and achieving that can be a slow process

Right now, less than 6 percent of Canadian exports go to Europe, while 70 percent travel to the US

It has always been the fate of political leaders to live and die by the stories they tell about the choices they make, and for a Savile Row–suited economist, Carney has proved remarkably adept at telling stories. Here in Brussels, home of the European bureaucratic machine, it is difficult to overstate the number of professional conference attendees who have adopted as their own the worldview popularized by the Davos Speech. The word rupture (la rupture, in French) has, I’m sure, been used more in the past ten months than in the nearly 200 years since Belgium’s declaration of independence. It would take at least two hands to count the number of people who have told me they now view the prime minister of Canada as the leader of the free world.

So it is perhaps no surprise that with Canada at “war” with our closest friend and trading partner, our Europhile prime minister is seeking to tie the Canadian economy closer to a $32 trillion economic bloc of countries that like him. It is, after all, a time for action.

However, after the Wall Street Journal announced to the world that Canada was discussing sweeping new co-operation with Europe under the presently non-existent title of “Associate Member of the European Union,” the reaction at home was not exactly measured. A senior European official told me, in impeccable Brussels-speak, that “we have been watching with some amusement at the speed with which the Canadian media and political context has escalated.”

Against that escalated context, even casual Canadian observers of the (creatively named) State of the European Union in September will have noted that European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen—despite saying she wanted to “open the door” to associate membership for........

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