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Bullied by the US, Canada Has a History of Reaching Out to Europe

The strategy hasn’t always paid off. Will it for Carney?

Canada has had deep connections to Europe for a very long time. These offer us enduring guideposts. Canada and Europe have common values that come from a shared past, a persistent concern for stability and security, and a desire to counterbalance the overweening power of the United States.

The notion that Canada is an Atlantic nation—a country that belongs to both Europe and North America—goes back to the early 1940s, when Canadian policy makers adopted the language used by British and American leaders in the early days of the Second World War to capture the geostrategic bond between their two countries, even before the US entered the war in December 1941. The Atlantic Charter of August 1941, signed by British prime minister Winston Churchill and US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, which set out the goals for the international system after the war, is an exemplar of the Atlantic idea.

The roots of the idea actually go back to a time well before the sudden acceleration of Anglo-American co-operation after the Nazi conquest of much of western Europe. Canada’s links across the Atlantic had been deeply anchored from the time of initial European settlement and the decisions of the 1770s not to follow the American colonies into independence. The vast majority of those living in Canada had always felt the transatlantic ties of birth, family, national origin, politico-cultural inspiration, and commerce.

The North Atlantic connection very much shaped Canada’s geostrategic posture for more than forty years. The commitment to station Canadian forces in Europe was a key element, coming to an end only with the Cold War. And even after the conservative government of Brian Mulroney decided to bring this commitment to a close in 1991, the Canadian Armed Forces remained actively engaged in transatlantic politics—in the Balkans in the 1990s and in the Baltics in the 2010s and 2020s. Throughout, Canada’s status as an Atlantic nation remained central to Canadian self-perception.

The idea of Canada as an Atlantic nation was eventually joined by similar transoceanic projections involving the two other oceans that border the country. That Canada is a Pacific nation was first bruited by the Liberal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1970, repeated by every subsequent government, most recently by that of Justin Trudeau in Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy. The claim that Canada is an Arctic nation is relatively recent, having first been embraced by Mulroney’s government in the 1980s, although since that time, it has been used on occasion by every government, most enthusiastically by the Conservatives under Stephen Harper between 2006 and 2015.

To call Canada an Atlantic nation, a Pacific nation, or an Arctic nation may be a fanciful way to imagine the country given........

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