What’s In It for Ordinary People?

Willem Maas, Glendon College, York University

maas@yorku.ca 

April 6, 2025

The idea of Canada strengthening ties to the EU as a counterweight to American influence has circulated since the 1960s (Canada is the EU's oldest formal relationship with any industrialized country), and dysfunction in the United States makes it more attractive. Other contributors to this forum focus on the barriers to full membership, but Canada could conceivably become the EU’s sixth most populous member state after Germany, France, Italy, Spain – and also the UK, whose rejoining the EU at the same time as Canada (and also Ukraine and other countries that have been negotiating accession) would address several concerns. But what would Canada joining the EU mean for ordinary people?

Free movement not only of goods, services, and capital but also of people has been a core value and aspiration of the European project since its origins. The idea of common European rights, culminating in a common EU citizenship, means that EU citizens have extensive rights that all EU member states must respect, throughout EU territory. And the top answer to the public opinion survey question “What does the European Union mean to you personally?” is almost always the “Freedom to travel, study and work anywhere in the EU,” demonstrating that the rights of EU citizenship are enormously popular. How would Canada fit into this?

After the 2016 Brexit referendum, the numbers of UK citizens seeking the citizenship of EU27 member states rose dramatically, demonstrating the value of EU citizenship. And the free movement provisions between the EU and Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland (Switzerland runs bilateral negotiations) also include coordination on social security matters and discussion of the mutual recognition of credentials and qualifications. Free movement rights would be a major benefit of membership (or closer association) for both Canadians and other EU citizens.

Geography matters – but the distance between Vancouver and Brussels is about the same as that between Honolulu and Washington DC. Contemporary societies reward people who are healthy, highly educated, and able to navigate the demands of a capitalist economy whose values sometimes conflict with ideals of democracy and equal citizenship – and many people are willing to move or commute for good jobs. In the economic boom of 2008 some 14,000 people living in Newfoundland and Labrador commuted to work in Alberta, not counting the thousands commuting to work in other Canadian provinces, nor the thousands who moved (rather than commuting) to other provinces. St. John’s is closer to Brussels than it is to Edmonton, so again geography should not restrain Canadians seeking work in Europe or Europeans seeking work in Canada.

Most people in Canada speak either English or French (or both), and the most recent census showed that 548,000 people in Canada spoke Italian, 419,000 German, 204,000 Polish, 145,000 Greek, 117,000 Romanian, and so forth; a further 1.2 million people in Canada spoke Spanish and 337,00 Portuguese. (Since then, the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel program welcomed almost 300,000 displaced Ukrainians to Canada with work and study permits.) This shared migration history suggests how ordinary people might benefit from even closer ties and rights of free movement between Europe and Canada.

Heather MacRae writes that joining the EU would protect and in places improve Canada’s social and welfare systems and bring tangible benefits to Canadians. If Canada joins decision-making structures such as the European Parliament and European Council, these benefits would be shared with other EU citizens as much as Canadians. EU citizenship reconfigures the meaning of boundaries within the EU by superimposing a new political community over already-existing member state political communities, making the EU comparable to federal states, which can best be understood through the lens of overlapping jurisdiction and multilevel citizenship.

Robert Finbow reminds us that focusing on trade liberalization, efficiency, and competitiveness entails the risk of increasing inequality, which has been fuel for the populists’ call for economic sovereigntism and protectionism. His suggestion that the benefits of transatlantic partnership need to be more broadly distributed seems essential to any closer EU-Canada ties. Despite the genesis of European rights in the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of nationality, EU free movement has always existed in tension with national welfare states and the desire of member states to control access to their territories, labour markets, and related institutions. This explains both the push for and resistance against developing overarching European social programs and would be an important limit on the usefulness of EU citizenship for Canadians after accession.

The elephant in the room, however, is the United States – with which Canada does the vast majority of its trade, shares the world’s longest international border, and also has strong migration links (from the Loyalists who left the revolutionary US to remain loyal to the British crown, the 30,000 to 40,000 fugitive African Americans who “rode” the Underground Railroad to Canada, to the Vietnam war resisters and others: today there are approximately one million US citizens living in Canada and approximately 900,000 people born in Canada living in the US, far more than the number of people born in Canada living in the EU, because historically migration was from Europe to Canada rather than the reverse. If the EU’s and Canada’s shared goal is to see Canada as a bridge between Europe and the United States, full EU membership for Canada might be a bridge too far.