Joining the EU would be a ridiculous response to Canada’s real problems

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Where did this idea come from, of Canada joining the European Union? I know the Prime Minister likes to say that Canada is “the most European of the non-European countries,” whatever that means. (More European than, say, Argentina? Uruguay? New Zealand?)

And sure, we’ve all joked about it, at least once, in the heat of Donald Trump’s latest outrage (“that’s it, we’re joining Europe!”). But we are now well past a joke. Finland’s President, Alexander Stubb, is the latest world leader to appear to entertain the prospect, pronouncing it “a marriage made in heaven” that could be negotiated “faster than Finland joining NATO.”

A German member of the European Parliament, Joachim Streit, has been a persistent advocate. France’s Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, seems at least open to discussing it. Former Alberta cabinet minister Thomas Lukaszuk is the only Canadian political leader of note to toy with the idea, but it’s clearly in the air. A Nanos poll for The Globe and Mail finds 58 per cent of Canadians in support or somewhat in support.

To which one can only respond: Huh? I suspect a good proportion of those 58 per cent think that Canada joining Europe would somehow shorten the flight times between them, if they’ve thought about it at all. Leave aside the legal and definitional quibbles – Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union reserves membership, quite reasonably, to “any European State,” a provision that would seem to exclude North American states – or the obvious political obstacles to joining.

Opinion: Canada would win some and lose some if it joined the EU

Why would we want to? Granted, EU membership is an attractive proposition in some ways. The 27 member states of the EU together form the world’s second-largest economy, two-thirds as large as America’s. It is rules-based, trade-oriented, with robust democratic institutions, independent courts, and a strong social safety net, all of which compare favourably with the United States in its current incarnation; its increasing military might, as America aligns increasingly with the dictatorships, is also reassuring. There’s a reason why so many neighbouring countries – Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, Ukraine, among others – are eager to join.

But Canada is not Montenegro. We are a major power, the second-largest country in the world by area, but also the 38th largest by population, and the ninth largest economy. Were we to join the EU, however, we’d be one country among 28 – 41 million people, out of nearly 500 million. We’d have some say in making EU laws, but we’d also have to accept the many EU laws that would apply to us.

It isn’t just a free-trade area. It’s also a customs union, meaning it imposes a common trade and tariff policy on its member states versus the rest of the world, meaning we’d have to junk all of our existing trade treaties – including the one with the U.S. (The last real attempt at a comprehensive U.S.-EU deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, died a decade ago.)

And not only that. We’d have to accept a common foreign policy as well. And a common agricultural policy, as well as a common fisheries policy. Common fiscal policy, at least with regard to the size of deficits (no more than three per cent of GDP) that member states can run. Probably a common currency, unless we negotiated some sort of carve-out for the dollar – though after the British experience, that may be off the table – with consequent loss of capacity to set an independent monetary policy.

We’d be subject to EU laws and regulations, the full acquis communautaire, all 170,000 pages of it, covering everything from product standards to environmental rules to financial regulations to labour law and beyond. The European Parliament would supplant the Parliament of Canada as the supreme law-making body across a broad swath of jurisdiction, as the Court of Justice of the European Union would the Supreme Court of Canada.

Joining the EU, in other words, would mean a substantial, and I mean substantial, loss of sovereignty. Ottawa seems far enough off to many Canadians. Now our capital, for many purposes, would be Brussels. Why would we want to do this? We’re worried enough about protecting our independence from America. Why would we want to surrender it to Europe? Granted, as imperial overlords go, Europe looks at lot nicer these days. But we don’t have to join Europe to stay out of the States.

If it’s access to European markets we’re after, we already have a free-trade treaty, the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), governing not only trade in goods and services, but investment as well. Signed in 2016, it has yet to obtain the required ratification by every member state (if they’re this uncertain about trading with us, try to imagine how they’d feel about having us as a member), but is largely in effect nevertheless.

Want deeper integration still, to include, for example, the free movement of people? Again, you can do that, without joining the EU, as the members of the European Free Trade Association (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland) have done – though at the price of having to accept all of the EU’s single-market regulations, without any say in how these are made. (Switzerland has its own arrangement.)

I get it. We’re in a jittery place these days. We wake up one morning to realize that our next-door neighbour and best friend, the country on which we’ve long depended for the bulk of our trade and all of our defence, has turned against us. Suddenly we’re in need of new allies, new trading partners. The idea of joining the European Union has a kind of surface appeal, a single-bullet solution to all our problems. But it’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t.

In our current fix, to be sure, we are obliged to think creatively, to be open to ideas we might not have considered before. But creative does not equal fantastical. There’s a lot of this sort of thing about these days. For example, some otherwise responsible commentators have suggested that the lesson of recent experience is that Canada should obtain its own nuclear weapons.

Uh-huh. How? For what purpose, precisely? Suppose we were to devote the tens of billions of dollars, at least, that would be required to develop the requisite capacity. Suppose we were to renounce our signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, not to mention NATO and NORAD, and suffer the resulting diplomatic, intelligence and economic, er, fallout.

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Suppose the U.S., in particular, were to stand by while its next-door neighbour was busy building a bomb that could take out New York or Washington, together with the capacity to deliver it – a process that would take several years, if not decades – and not do whatever it took to prevent it. And suppose after all this we were to end up with, what, a dozen nukes? Or even several.

Great. What then? Suppose, while we’re in the realm of fantasy, that the United States, under whoever was president then, threatened to invade Canada. Or suppose Russia or China did. What exactly are we going to do with our little bouquet of warheads, against a superpower bristling with more than 5,000 (United States, Russia) or even 1,000 (as China will certainly have by then)? Supposing any of this lunacy came to pass.

Our situation is not so dire as that! Even in the worst of worst cases, Ukraine has shown how a non-nuclear country can stand up to a superpower, using conventional (albeit novel) weaponry. And invasion, as such, is far less realistic a threat to this country than intimidation and coercion by other means.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need to build up our military – to see off any predatory probes, especially in our far-flung North; and to take our part in the defence of the democracies generally, a task that in future, sadly, may oblige us to act without the United States, if not against it.

But defence, in today’s world of hybrid and cyber warfare, means many things. It can even mean trade, given the growing propensity of the major powers to weaponize trade relations. So as long as we’re thinking creatively, have a look at the recent proposal from Renew Europe, a grouping of centrist parties on the continent.

In Depth: A U.S. invasion of Canada is still far-fetched. Canadians are preparing anyway

Entitled “How Europe can win geopolitical power,” it recommends, along with the usual calls to move further and faster toward a truly single market in Europe – the better to increase Europe’s bargaining leverage – the creation of a “Geoeconomic Deterrence Pact” with the other major democracies: Japan, South Korea and Canada, as well as other “strategically aligned partners.”

What does that mean? It means adopting a common approach to coercive trade tactics, such as the tariffs Mr. Trump has used to extract concessions from America’s trading partners. The idea, to borrow a phrase, is that a tariff on one should be regarded as a tariff on all, and trigger a collective response: an “economic Article 5,” as it is sometimes called, much like the famous provision of the NATO charter.

This idea, the brainchild of former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has been around for a few years. It has acquired more urgency since the return of Mr. Trump to power. As originally envisaged, it would be part of a broader Alliance of Democracies initiative. At the time, this included the United States. But it may be of even greater saliency without it.

As NATO begins to crack, and Europe – and the other democracies – look for ways to defend themselves without the U.S., we may need to think of new defence and trade arrangements, broader than NATO, narrower than the World Trade Organization.

Figuring out where we fit in all this will be challenging enough for Canada, without throwing in membership in the EU or a Canuck bomb in the mix.