Althea Raj

Yeah, I think there's several ways of looking at it.

The first is obviously Prime Minister Kearney is somebody who is close to Europe, you know, like led the Bank of England, has a lot of affinity towards Europe and has

nurtured a Rolodex of contacts in Europe.

So there's, I think, a natural personal affinity towards Europe that perhaps we didn't have in other prime ministers.

That's one angle, obviously, to the story.

The other angle is, of course, what it means for the KUSMA or the USMCA-related talks.

The prime minister has to walk a very fine line between telling Donald Trump that Canada has other options and we're not beholden to whatever strongman will he wants to impose on us, but at the same time also not annoy him to the point that he completely decides to rip the steel apart and walks away from the table.

So I think there's a little bit of both camps happening.

I thought what was interesting in his opening remarks at the European political community meeting that he was invited to by Macron from France was he said two things I thought were interesting.

One is what the Europeans want from us.

often in this country, we talk about energy.

He said, no, no, no.

We go there saying we will offer you energy, but what they really want is critical minerals.

So to Rob's point, the Europeans, if they do want to lead the world, have a lot of their own affairs to sort out continentally, notably on defense and security, especially if the Americans walk away.

And that is something that we can say, hey, we want to be a partnership with Europe.

The other thing I thought was interesting was he talked about some of the key themes from the Davos speech, one of which being we take the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.

But in a way, he is wishing it to be something.

And perhaps for all the reasons that Rob outlined, all the challenges that Europe already itself faces, right?

you have a prime minister saying, you know, these, the ideals of freedom of democracy, rule of law, these are the human rights.

These are the things that we want to work on together.