Prime Minister Mark Carney during the Canada-EU Summit in Brussels in June.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Canada has likely never had a Prime Minister as smitten with Europe as Mark Carney.
Since taking office, Mr. Carney has travelled to more than 10 European countries and been to France and Italy twice. On his first trip to Paris, barely three days after his swearing in, he even referred to Canada as “the most European of the non-European countries.” Canada has since signed several serious-sounding, but non-binding, pacts with the European Union drawing us, at least rhetorically, closer to Europe.
The Prime Minister is again headed across the Atlantic on Saturday to attend the European Political Community Summit in Armenia, at the invitation of European Council President António Costa – the “first time a non-European leader has joined the Summit,” according to the PMO.
Mr. Carney clearly sees pursuing closer Canada-EU ties as not just an element of a broader strategy to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States, but as an expression of our Europeanness, if not our anti-Americanism.
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Of course, Mr. Carney did not explain what he meant when he called Canada “the most European of the non-European countries.” But one suspects he was referring, in part, to our mixed economy and social safety net that have more in common with EU countries than the United States, where rugged individualism and free markets rule.
Every prime minister puts his own spin on the Canadian identity. Tory Brian Mulroney, an unabashed admirer of the United States, emphasized our North Americanness. Jean Chrétien, a Liberal nationalist, distanced Canada from Washington as he pursued deeper ties with China. Conservative Stephen Harper played up Canada’s British heritage and the monarchy. The free-spirited Justin Trudeau called Canada the “first post-national state.”
Mr. Carney, a multilateralist who seeks to strengthen Canada’s global influence, is not entirely wrong to emphasize our ties with Europe, a continent with which we share more history and values than any other. The only problem with his Euro-fascination – not to mention the absurd idea of Canada joining the EU that has gained currency in some circles here – is that Europe is these days in an economic and political mess from which it will not soon, if ever, recover.
Since 2000, the EU has become an economic also-ran, humiliatingly outpaced in the global technology race by the United States and China. The very structure of the EU, with each of its 27 member countries holding a veto power, has paralyzed its ability to act with the speed and flexibility needed to transform its sclerotic economy.
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At the same time, the EU’s demographic decline and anemic productivity have rendered its social model unaffordable. Public debt levels have soared above 100 per cent of GDP in several EU countries. A recession could thrust the entire EU into a debt crisis. Radical economic reform is needed to make Europe, well, grow again.
Unfortunately, reform is a dirty word in the EU. The Europe that Mr. Carney appears to admire so much is a bureaucratic leviathan in which the real power lies with unelected Eurocrats in Brussels who seek to regulate anything that moves, sending investors fleeing and stifling innovation.
“In Europe, technocratic power has become political power,” writes former French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, in a new book. “The European Union has the appearance of a democracy, obeys the rules of democracy, scrupulously respects democratic procedures, but in reality, functions as out-of-control technocratic machine. A monster.”
Mr. Le Maire is no Euroskeptic populist. He served as pro-European French President Emmanuel Macron’s top economic minister for seven years until 2024. But his book, titled Le temps d’une décision (The Time for a Decision), calls for blowing up the EU in its current form and replacing it with a six-country economic union – comprised of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland – capable of acting with the speed and purpose needed to restore Europe’s ranking in the global economy.
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Mr. Le Maire is hardly the first pro-European public figure to sound the alarm. Most notably, in 2024, former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi produced a detailed blueprint for reform to stimulate investment and innovation.
“Europe’s fundamental values are prosperity, equity, freedom, peace and democracy in a sustainable environment … If Europe can no longer provide them to its people … it will have lost its reason for being,” Mr. Draghi warned then. “The only way to meet this challenge is to grow and become more productive … And the only way to become more productive is for Europe to radically change.”
Hitching our economic wagon to Europe might sound attractive to Canadians smarting from U.S. President Donald Trump’s rude treatment and unfair trade war. But a hard look at Europe today should disabuse anyone of that notion.
Even a hopeless Europhile like Mr. Carney.