Inside Canada's EU Courtship
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Why is Canada considering an “Associate Membership” of the European Union?
The relationship between Canada and the US has been on the rocks for a while. And now it seems like Canada is ready to move on.
Canada wants to be a part of the European Union. Prime Minister Mark Carney says he is interested in making Canada the first associate member of the EU.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Canada is in talks to become an associate member of the European Union. What's been happening since, according to the Wall Street Journal, is a flurry of diplomacy with Europe. What is an associate member of the European Union? Nobody knows. That is such a great
question. What is an associate member? That's our colleague Drew Hinshaw. I think it's a bit deeper than finding like someone else to buy Canadian products. I think it's about finding a set of countries that Canada shares values or feels it shares values with, with whom it can create institutions and tech capabilities that are sort of out of the reach of America's wrecking ball.
So it's obviously not every day that a country that is not in Europe brings up the European Union and says, Hey, can we join you? Хауг адел из момент?
This is a massive rewiring of the economic cabling of what we call the West. For a long time, the West as a geo-economic structure has revolved around the United States, its market, its military power, its technology. And all of a sudden, our closest allies, our northern neighbor, our allies across the ocean, are saying we are too dependent on America. It is something that
the European Union's never done before. That's our colleague Joe Parkinson. I mean, there has been talk for years of the idea of some kind of flexible membership, some kind of associate membership. And it's been talked about for Ukraine, it was obviously talked about for the UK after Brexit. And the fact is that the conditions now seem to be ripe enough, and Canada seems to be the candidate that's right enough that they can actually for the first time do this. So it is a big deal. It's a historic moment, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
Амін, зислак вот.
That's right. This is a huge bet on Europe, whose economy is growing at half the rate of the United States. And Carney is trying to say to his country, there are more fish in the sea.
senior leaders in the West that are talking about these issues and sort of trying to think and design almost in real time what the West decoupled from America might look like.
Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutsen. It's Tuesday, September 22nd. Coming up on the show, why Canada is cozy up to Europe.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's bid to pivot Canada away from the US by aligning with the European Union kind of feels like a breakup. But if so, it's sort of like going back to an old X. Because for the first half of the 20th century, some Canadians actually thought of themselves as Europeans located in North America.
This has all kind of been forgotten to historical memory, but the oldest Canadians still alive today were born as British subjects.
What does “associate member” actually mean for Canada and the EU?
There wasn't even an embassy, a Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C., until the 1920s. Really, up until World War II, Canadians could imagine themselves as Europeans, as British subjects on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And the other days of the week, they could be North Americans. They had the best of both worlds. They actually, on the eve of World War II, traded.
But after Allied forces won the war, and the US became the center of gravity in the West, things started to change in North America.
Сенс ворту. Canadian businesses and Canadian politics in a way have really oriented so closely around the United States. In the nineteen sixties, you had a range of deals to integrate the two countries' automobile industries. That obviously blossomed into into nafta. The nafta completely transformed Canadian society.
NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in nineteen ninety-four, solidified the two countries' relationship.
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