Geography is becoming the least interesting barrier between Canada and the European Union. But the maple leaf will never fly over Brussels.
This week in Yerevan, Mark Carney took his seat at the eighth summit of the European Political Community, between Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. The room contained 48 heads of state and government, drawn from every corner of Europe and its periphery. Carney was the only person there who governs a country on the wrong continent.
His presence was the latest in a sequence. In February, Canada’s defence minister, David McGuinty, signed his country into SAFE, the European Union’s 150 billion euros loans-for-weapons programme, making Canada the first non-European country to join. The same month brought a Security and Defence Partnership with Brussels, building on a Strategic Partnership of the Future agreed in 2025. Two-way trade between the bloc and Canada reached 120.5 billion euros in 2025, making the EU Canada’s second-biggest commercial partner after America. Canadian firms hold 187 billion euros of direct investment in EU member states, somewhat more than the EU holds in Canada.
The shift has a single, bronzed, tariff-flinging cause. Donald Trump’s threats, beginning with his musings about annexing Canada as a 51st state, have done what 30 years of Canadian diversification rhetoric never managed. Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England with a doctorate from Oxford, ran his election campaign last year on the explicit theme that Canada’s old transatlantic equation no longer added up. Visiting Davos in January, he told the World Economic Forum that the United States-led order had “ruptured” and that middle powers must regroup.
The most European of the non-European countries
Speculation has duly turned to membership. In Berlin in March, Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, told an audience that the EU was attracting fresh candidates: Iceland imminently, “and, maybe, Canada at some point”. He smiled. The room laughed and applauded.
In Ottawa a month later, Alexander Stubb, Finland’s president, made the case more directly. “I can envisage a much larger EU,” he told the CBC on April 15, before adding that the question was Canada’s to decide. Canadians have been warming to it. A YouGov survey in 2025 found that 42 per cent supported joining, with 33 per cent opposed. The latest European Political Monthly poll, published on May 1, found majorities or pluralities in favour in each of the EU’s five biggest member states: 55 per cent in Germany, 51 per cent in Spain, 46 per cent in Poland, 42 per cent in France and 41 per cent in Italy.
It is, of course, not going to happen. Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union restricts membership to ‘European states’, a phrase Brussels has chosen to read geographically rather than civilisationally. Even modest integration has been laborious: CETA, the bilateral free-trade deal signed by Stephen Harper in 2016, has been in only provisional force for nine years. Ten member states still have not ratified it, including France and Italy. Cyprus’s parliament voted it down outright in 2020.
Canadian voices have been similarly cool. Meredith Lilly of Carleton University in Ottawa, who advised Harper on trade, has warned that membership would hand the European Parliament authority over Canadian commercial policy. Fen Osler Hampson, who co-chairs the Expert Group on Canada-US Relations, calls accession “a non-starter”. Carney himself, addressing the EU-Canada summit in Brussels last June, described his country as “the most European of the non-European countries” before ruling joining out. Such a step would mean the Canadian dollar yielding to the euro, Ottawa accepting Brussels’s free-movement rules, and Quebec’s farmers facing direct competition with Italian dairymen and French winemakers. No prime minister of Canada has ever been remotely tempted to acquire that bundle of headaches.
Off the map
The boundary that supposedly makes membership impossible (the Atlantic) is doing less analytical work than it once did. Hungary, with a thousand-year European pedigree, until recently spent years vetoing decisions on Ukraine. Cyprus, geographically in the Levant and politically in Brussels, has refused to ratify the EU’s flagship deal with Canada. Canada, meanwhile, has joined SAFE, leads a NATO multinational brigade in Latvia and lines up with EU positions on Ukraine.
Look closely at what is being built and it amounts to associate membership in everything but name. The Strategic Partnership of the Future, signed in 2025, was followed within a year by the Security and Defence Partnership, the Strategic Partnership on Raw Materials, the Digital Partnership and the Green Alliance. Canada is associated with Pillar 2 of Horizon Europe, the bloc’s flagship research programme. SAFE participation opens a defence-industrial market mostly closed to non-members. None of this is membership. Together it adds up to integration deeper than that enjoyed by Switzerland or Norway, which at least have the consolation of being on the correct continent.
Iceland may yet join the bloc whose continental shelf it shares. Canada, on the wrong shelf entirely, will not join the bloc it has come to resemble. Both arrangements, in their different ways, leave the question of where Europe ends unresolved.
Photo: Dreamstime.