While the White House has been issuing a torrent of threats—including promises to use “economic force” to annex Canada, and hints at other more direct methods, like forced annexation—Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been quietly hunting for new suitors. For over a year, The Wall Street Journal reports, he has been exchanging sweet nothings on long-distance phone calls with the leaders of the Old Continent. Canada, he teases foreign leaders, is open for business. Its huge tracts of land are just waiting to be exploited—its amber grain, pink potash, and hot natural gas overflowing in abundance. And with generous new tax incentives to rival even American corporate giveaways, it’ll even pick up the check. We’re just like America, he hints—only sweeter.
What, exactly, “associate member” would mean is anyone’s guess; officials on both sides soon played it down with mild embarrassment. In his response, Carney referred only to “an alliance for the future.” Some members of the European Parliament responded with the bitterness of a rejected suitor. “It was an absurd and unrealistic knee-jerk reaction,” Siegbert Frank Droese, a far-right German MEP, lamented. Europe simply wanted “the closest possible” relationship, President of the European Council Antonio Costa clarified. “I don’t think we should get too bogged down with words and labeling,” Mark Camilleri of the Canada EU Trade and Investment Association told me, channeling the consummate bachelor.
For most Canadians, this is all a fantasy worthy of fan fiction. Many Canadians, especially of Carney’s urbane class, have long nurtured the aspirational notion that they are closer in character to Europeans than to their neighbors to the south. They tend to look fondly on a welfare state. Their genteel gradualism, born of their lengthy breakup with Britain, makes them natural partners for slow, set-in-their-ways European institutions; their common-law conventions make them reluctant rebels, studious observers of norms and traditions.
A well-armed, well-funded Canada offers Europe more than just resources: It is also strategically positioned to see the continent through the next century of war and warming. As long as it maintains sovereignty over the Northwest Passage (a fact the United States has long denied), it controls the only Arab- and Russian-free route from Europe to Asia, offering secure shipping no matter the EU’s stance on Israel, Ukraine, Iran, or America’s next war.
But what, you might ask, would Canada gain from flirting with a club its own members want to leave? In some conservative corners, news of Carney’s surprise European romance prompted alarm from those fattened on a drip-feed of Brexit-style panic. Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s nonentity of an opposition leader, issued dire warnings of becoming Europe’s “twenty-eighth state” and falling victim to “reckless European-style immigration.”
Canada had long since signed on to the more feasible aspects of this exchange. It still struggles to fill its quota for some tariff-free European food products under a free-trade agreement signed in 2016 (and still unratified by 10 EU states). Italian wine is already cheaper than Canadian on many liquor store shelves. Canada long ago signed onto Europe’s $106 billion research fund, Horizon Europe, and its defense procurement agreement, SAFE. It remains to be seen what more could actually be done in terms of formal ties with the continent, besides slightly cheaper exchanges to the Sorbonne for the children of Canada’s wealthiest families.
It’s perhaps a little damning that the European Union, once thought a possible global hegemon in its own right, was among the first on Carney’s invite list.
It’s perhaps a little damning that the European Union, once thought a possible global hegemon in its own right, was among the first on Carney’s invite list. Carney has been explicit: His goal is not to seriously challenge U.S. power by crafting a new “great power rival … with better manners.” Rather, it’s to insulate his country—and, if you take him at his word, the civilized world—from the more insane impulses of America’s increasingly unhinged government—like the sudden defunding of USAID.
There are reasons to be skeptical. Carney’s bid for closer ties with Europe comes at a time when the continent’s governments—and the EU itself—are struggling to resist a tidal wave of right-wing populism. Any substantial agreement may see Carney shaking hands with Germany’s first far-right chancellor since the last one shot himself in a bunker. While Trump is addled and ineffectual, the far-right in Europe is operating with a genuine democratic mandate—at least, as long as there is any democracy left.
That should offer some consolation to Americans worried about their place in the world, or their special relationship with their neighbors to the north. Get yourself a few billion dollars in assets, and even the debonair likes of Carney will still fling open the doors, lay out the family china, and attempt to woo you from your wallet. It’s also a sad indication that, like many partners in abusive relationships, Canada may not be able to resist crawling back to the United States if it puts on a serious show of being reformed. “That’s a question that I’ve heard Europeans ask,” Hurrelmann told me. “What happens when the trade war is over? Will Canada still be interested in these types of things?”
The answer to that question is hard to discern while Trump continues blustering from the White House. Like many genteel Canadians, Carney likely may have an inclination to lean away from America anyway—from its increasingly crass politics, debased culture, and unrestrained greed. Canadians may be more American than they like to admit, but they are not as American as America is now. Another few years of accelerating decay may simply be too much to come back from. For now, at least, Canada is exploring its options—and it doesn’t seem inclined to wait around. Jilted lovers seldom do.
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