“We must urgently reimagine our partnerships.” With that, Ursula von der Leyen turned to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday and offered Canada something the EU has never offered anyone: the chance to become its first “associate member.”
The catch is that no such category exists. The 27-member bloc has close ties with Norway, Iceland and Switzerland, which are tied in deeply and follow many EU rules, but it has never had a formal associate tier. Nobody has said what Canada’s access to the single market would look like. During Brexit talks, EU officials repeatedly insisted that no status could leave a foreign country half in and half out of it.
The pitch
Von der Leyen said the two sides “see the world with the same eyes” on AI, climate, the Ukraine war and geopolitics. She wants the existing trade deal upgraded to an “alliance for the future” and a “common prosperity and economic security space.” Her list: a tech alliance, integrated defence industrial bases, and the Arctic as a “flagship joint project.” EU officials are especially keen on Canadian energy and natural resources, and she pitched work on critical minerals, batteries, quantum computing and cybersecurity.
The push has a backdrop. Carney wants less dependence on US trade, and the two partners have been drawing closer since Donald Trump returned to the White House, raised tariffs on both and kept talking about Canada as a 51st state. Last month Carney broke off trade talks with Washington and introduced retaliatory tariffs on billions of dollars of US goods. The EU, by contrast, accepted 15% tariffs on many European goods last year and dropped its own duties to avoid a trade war. A summit is planned for late October.
Doubts in Brussels
On closer reading, the enthusiasm is thinner than the headline. The phrase surprised EU insiders, since von der Leyen had not used it when she briefed senior diplomats the Friday before. One diplomat said member states backed the ambition but had worried she was overpromising: “‘Associate membership’ sounds like a nice headline but in reality 10 member states have still not ratified Ceta.” A second called it “an empty phrase.”
Analysts see the same gap. Martin Leng of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics said Canada’s “membership” may amount to “plugging in” to existing programmes such as the European Defence Agency. Roland Paris of the University of Ottawa, a former adviser to Justin Trudeau, said the label “doesn’t really matter” and expects “a collection of agreements rather than membership in any institutional sense.”
At home Carney faces a fight. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre warned that Canadians “struggling to pay their rent” would have to pay more taxes to fund EU bureaucracy, and wrote: “We will NEVER be the 51st American state. And we will NEVER be the 28th state of the European Union.” Paris said no Canadian leader would want formal membership that meant subordinating Canadian law, and he did not think that was on the table.
Javier Moreno Sánchez, the Spanish socialist MEP who leads Parliament’s Canada delegation, was warmer. “Canadians are the most European people outside Europe,” he said. The offer is also certain to raise questions among other allies, the UK among them, which has long sought a more flexible approach from Brussels.
