Beyond Membership: Canada’s Path to Closer EU Integration
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- Apr 4
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Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, University of Victoria
April 2, 2025
In this short essay, in response to the question raised by my esteemed colleague Frédéric Mérand of the University of Montreal – “How Canada could get much closer to Europe?”[1] – I argue that there are so many opportunities for Canada to seek a closer association to the European Union that Canada should not focus on full membership, and that none of the existing membership or partnership arrangements should be examples for Canada. Starting with a brief review of Canada’s free trade agreement with the European Union. I argue that without prime minister Stephen Harper’s political will and strategic farsightedness, such a treaty would have never happened. Today, Canadians have extensive choices; Indeed, because of the numerous kinds of European Union membership-treaties, Canadians have a lot of options to strengthen their association to the European Union. Ultimately, however, Canadians should lead the way and decide what kind of association to the European Union work best for them.
It all started with Canada initiating the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement.
A few years ago, while I was doing research on the question of why Canada had approached the European Union with the idea of a comprehensive free trade agreement? – which happened in the Halifax meeting of October 16-17, 2008[2]– I discovered to my astonishment that members of the team of the President of the European Council (at the time, the president of France, Sarkozy) had been, to say the least, sceptical. My contact in the EU delegation explained that (1) they were not only surprised but also reluctant, that (2) the EU did not need to partner with yet another economy focused on exporting primary goods (electricity, oil, gas, lumber, iron ore, uranium, nickel…); and (3) further explained that the true surprise was for the EU experts to discover that Canada was not simply a commodities superpower but also a services industry powerhouse with world-wide networks in banking, finance, accounting, legal and marketing industries, and with fast growing and increasingly competitive sectors such as architecture, accommodation and food services, healthcare/pharmaceuticals, and arts and entertainment; and that those would offer a strong free-trade partnership to EU member states’ own economies.
Harper’s strategic foresight at the time of the 2008 economic crisis[3] must be acknowledged. Elected as Prime Minister in 2006, he had foreseen this fundamental transformation of Canada. In the European Union, only The Economist had praised Canada with its September 2003 issue: “Canada’s new spirit”. The weekly had suggested Canada was ‘cool’[4]. In 2008, at the Halifax meeting, Prime Minister Harper was the one who had vowed to work on a treaty with the European Union to develop a free trade partnership to strengthen Canada’s economy (the goal was a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement or CETA). In his own words ‘these times call for closer economic co-operation among key players in the global economy’. Indeed, in 2008 Canada’s trade with the EU stood at 2% of all exports and 1.5% of all imports – Canada was the 11th largest trade partner of the EU.
By 2024, i.e. post CETA (signed in 2016), Brexit (referendum 2016, treaty 2020) and the COVID pandemic (2020-22), according to the Conference Board of Canada, the two-way trade between Canada and the EU had expanded: exports were up by 57% and imports by 61%. In 2024, the EU is Canada’s second-largest trading partner with 84 billion of imports into Canada and 34 billion worth of exports to the EU. Hence a rapidly growing two-way trade, valued of 128 billion annually.[5]
In sum, the CETA taught Canada that working with the EU is a matter of negotiations. Therefore, knowing what Canada wants to achieve is crucial. So, I am arguing here that what should be central to Canada’s own membership decision-making is to know what kind of membership Canadians want.
Indeed, what does it mean to be a member of the European Union? In theory and practice, to become a full member, a candidate country should (1) be European (Maastricht Treaty Art. 49), (2) it must accept and implement the entirety of the body of EU law at the time of candidacy (in EU jargon, the ‘acquis communautaire’), (3) all EU member-states must agree to it.
However, it is also important to know that (1) what a European country is, has been formally controversial since a 1992 European Community document “Europe and the Challenge of Enlargement”[6] that points to the lack of definition of what is European culture, and what is beyond the frontiers of the European Union; as argued on this platform by Oliver Schmidtke, Canada is possibly culturally the most ‘European non-European country’. (2) Also, many countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Turkey, and Ukraine) are candidate countries currently; Turkey’s candidacy started in 1987. Ukraine’s candidacy was launched in February 2022. (3) Most candidate member-states struggle for years to implement the acquis. The EU has been unflexible, but a few countries were granted exceptional delays of up to seven years to finalise the implementation of the acquis (Greece, Spain and Portugal).
Yet despite this stringent legal exercise of conformity to EU legislation, today only six of 27 member states of the EU – Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and Slovenia – participate in ALL the EU’s provisions. It is worth underscoring this number: only six member-states are what we can understand as being full-fledged member of the Union because they are party to all the European treaties.
All the other 21 (who implemented all the acquis at the time of their candidacies) are also called member states, but they are NOT part or have not signed into some of the EU treaties. To illustrate this counter-intuitive idea, here are a few examples: (1) Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden are not part of the Euro zone (the European currency). (2) Cyprus and Ireland are not part of Schengen Agreement (Cyprus is a candidate for this EU border policy); and Schengen Two – also known as the Prüm Convention – failed to attract Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland and Ireland. (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Sweden are candidates, i.e. 13 of 27 members are not party to the Prüm Convention.) (3) Denmark is not part of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice whereby member states cooperate on matters concerned with migration, justice and fundamental rights. (4) Poland has not signed the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. (5) The European Patent with Unitary Effect was not endorsed in Croatia and Spain. (6) The European Union Divorce Law Pact was not ratified in Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland Slovakia, and Sweden. (7) The European Public Prosecutor’s office has no jurisdiction in Denmark, Hungary and Ireland because they opted out. Currently, Hungary’s opposition party, Tisza, has publicly committed to it. (8) In case of financial difficulty, members of the European Stability Mechanisms have access to a permanent financial firewall, but Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Ireland and Sweden are not members.
Nevertheless, it is important to underscore that ALL 27 member states are part of the European Economic Area, hence expanding free trade across all member states and the members of the European Free Trade Association.
In addition, and this is particularly interesting to us in Canada, there are countries that are not members of the European Union but have partnered and signed multiples agreements and treaties with the European Union: Norway joined nearly all the EU treaties. Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein are members of the European Free Trade Association that promotes free trade and economic cooperation; Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein are also signatories of the European Economic Area, which is a single market enforcing free movement of services, goods, capital and people; Iceland and Norway are part of the Schengen Zone. However, because of the EU fisheries regulations, neither Norway nor Iceland are EU member states.
In conclusion, if being a full-fledged member of the European Union may seem too ambitious to both member states and non-member states, it is important to remember that (1) close relations with the EU can be based on diverse forms of association, (2) to most countries associated to the Union, strengthening those many forms of association remains the preferred approach; (3) the reality of EU membership points to multispeed association; (4) Canada’s own path started with a focus on trade and education.
[1] Frédéric Mérand How Canada could get much closer to Europe, Policy Option/Option Politiques March 14, 2025.
[5] This is 16% of what Canada trades with the United States, i.e. 761 billion Canadian dollars in two-way trade in 2024.
[6] European Community (1992) “Europea and the Challenge of Enlargement”. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/d94b400d-b92f-4d91-995e-5f0ad1b36abe.
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