Front Burner - The EU opens the door to Canada

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

At her State of the Union address yesterday, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, made a historic offer: she wants Canada to become the first “associate member” of the European Union.No one knows exactly what that will mean. Associate membership is a designation that doesn’t currently exist in the EU.But Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson think it could be transformational. They’re two of the journalists who first broke this story in the Wall Street Journal, and they think this signals more than a changing relationship between Canada and Europe. It’s a sign of a fundamental shift in the international order.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

Hi there, I'm Jamie Poisson, and my podcast, Front Burner, looks at the major news stories affecting Canada and the world. There is no shortage of important international news right now, but that is not the only type of news that matters. So do local stories about your municipal elections across the GTA, your safety on the TTC, your affordable housing plans, which is why they deserve their very own podcast. This is Toronto is a weekly deep dive into the lives and issues that matter to Torontonians, released every one. Wednesday and Friday and available wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hey everybody, I'm Jamie Poisson. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney became the first foreign head of government ever

to attend the European State of the Union. And during her speech, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, made an extraordinary offer. Dear Mark, I said we must urgently reimagine our partner. So I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to being the first associate member of the European Union. The idea that Canada could become an associate member of the EU was first surfaced by the Wall Street Journal last weekend and prompted lots of questions. What exactly is an associate member? What would that mean for Canadians individually in the country at large?

and what are the arguments for and against it? So today I'm here with the two journalists from the Wall Street Journal, who originally broke this news. Drew Hinshaw joins us from Madrid, and Joe Parkinson is in Lisbon. Joe, Drew, thank you so much for coming back on Frontburner. It's great to have you back. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having us.

So Mark Carney became, as I said, the first foreign head of government to attend the European State of the Union on Wednesday, the day that we are talking. When people are listening to this on Thursday, he will be giving this big speech, but on Wednesday he received a standing ovation in Parliament after von der Leyen made this offer.

This is not a partnership against anyone else, but for our common strength. In short, we want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible to open the door for Canada to become an associate

member of the EU. And Joe, maybe I'll start with you. First off, How big a deal is this? Is this offer? I think even the people that want to say that there's a degree of hyperbole in this recognize that this is a big step. This is something which the European Union has thought about, has debated, has discussed. The German Chancellor has even proposed the idea of an associate membership for Ukraine. The associate status Merritt argues in the document will grant UK.

Ukraine access to the decision-making bodies, the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament without voting rights or a dedicated portfolio. It's something which has been talked about for years, and yet there's never been a moment considered ripe enough or a candidate considered right enough to make this offer. We are definitely at the beginning of a process rather than at the end, and I'm sure we'll get into all the caveats and all the difficulties. and just because the EU looks like it's now entertaining the idea of becoming more flexible, doesn't mean it's a particularly flexible organization and going to just drop its rules.

So we have a long way to go, but it is a big day. It is a momentous step. And it says a lot about the reordering of geopolitics and particularly a reordering of an idea of what we know as the West and how fast it's happening in this age of the second Trump administration. and Canada, of course, is center stage. Drew, let me bring you in here. When Carney was asked about your reporting, he kind of denied the label of associate member.

We're not looking to become a member of the European Union. What we are looking and we'll begin discussions for unique alliance with the European Union between Canada and the European Union. We share the same value. What is your sense of what Carney is thinking here? Is he considering working towards becoming an associate member of the EU? Carney has instructed his special envoy to Europe to scope out the most ambitious possibilities short of full membership in the EU or its common market.

Any country that joins the EU has to take on a whole bunch of burdens, including paying into the EU budget, that frankly Canada isn't going to take on. And then there's the question of geography, because obviously Canada is not in Europe. However, the Prime Minister wants to plug into Europe as much as possible. They want to find ways for Canada to lock into Europe's single market on a sector-by-sector basis for things such as energy, critical minerals. We will work on intelligent manufacturing. We will create a tech alliance. We will integrate defense industrial bases.

We will make the Arctic a flagship joint project. We will work on energy-critical minerals and batteries on AI quantum cyber. economic security. And to European leaders, Canada has even suggested Canada to take on this title. It doesn't currently exist, associate member of the European Union. It's not clear what that would mean. And I think frankly, it's not even that important to the prime minister or his team what you call Canada so long as this incredibly famously bureaucratic organization, the EU, starts moving and creating some space for Canada and the EU to boost cooperation. And a whole range of issues that, frankly, both blocks at the moment depend on the U.S.

for. Your reporting says that you spoke to officials from a dozen different governments who told you that Carney's ambitions for Canada's relationship with the EU actually go beyond what he's been saying publicly. I just say more about that. What exactly were you hearing from these officials? I mean, the full scope of these talks, it's very technical wonky stuff. It's often mired in these technical details like European

in rules of origin texts. And for that reason, I think it has barely registered in the U.S. and to a degree hasn't fully registered in Canada. But it adds up, I would argue, to do something as both very wonky and one of the world's most significant reactions to Trump's second presidency. You see Canada and the EU trying to do more on research so they can create a network of scientific and academic output that can both compete with the U.S. university system

and be a fallback if the U.S. university system becomes less, productive in the world for whatever reasons. Secondly, you're seeing Carney pushing to join the EU's study abroad program. I don't know how well-known this is in Canada, but the EU has a study abroad program called Erasmus, where students from basically any EU country can study in another. French people go to Spain, Spanish people go to Poland, whatever. I think that the Prime Minister's office would love to see Canadians and Europeans be able to participate in some way with each other's programs like that.

You have other issues. There are two sides of talking about laying underwater. cables to link Europe and Canada and to have jointly construct data centers, cloud storage. There's talks about doing more in space for satellite networks so that governments, when they talk to each other, aren't dependent on Elon Musk's satellites. These are like kind of the wonky plumbing underneath the geopolitical order that we've all lived in since the end of the Cold War, at least. And it's not always the most evident thing, but I think it's actually, it's a huge thing. I mean, as one senior Canadian official put it to us, this is a major

geopolitical pivot. This is Canada turning from looking at itself as a North American nation to a transatlantic nation. And I think the Europeans are very open to doing more with Canada because they themselves recognize that the world order we live in was built around the assumption that the U.S. was dependable. And it is good for both Canada and Europe in their views if they can rely on each other for things like data, storage, AI, quantum computing, critical minerals, rather than being totally dependent on their most important ally of the United States. I would just add to that, that what we learned as we started reporting around Europe and getting insight from people who were either in the room or briefed on some of these

conversations with the Canadians, that there was a clear trajectory. The Prime Minister set the tone, set the objectives. And I think the Prime Minister's Office would say, credibly, they haven't been misleading anyone because they've been very, you know, above board that what they wanted to do was to develop as kind of closer relationship as possible with the EU. That said, under the surface, the European officials were quite taken about quite shocked by the frenzy of diplomatic activity from the Canadian side. The number of different channels that were established, the number of communication and contact groups that started to flourish. the urgency, I think, which the Europeans only caught up with after we saw the crisis in Greenland

and after we saw the war in Iran. Now I think the two sides are definitely on the same page. Although I think this language, which, let's be honest, I think it's actually shocked quite a few Canadians, this idea of an associate membership being offered to Canada in terms of its speed and potentially its breadth and its depth. This language was only finalised in the last 48 hours. there was another speech of, you know, a copy of von der Leyen speech that was circulating that didn't have this language in it.

So it shows just how quickly and how in flux these things are. Do you have any insight into why they decided to go with that language in the last 48 hours? I should just clarify, I should say there was a copy of the language that was circulated in the last 48 hours, and the language was agreed by both sides. And so things are definitely in flux, and things are definitely still. moving. And I think there's just a, what this says, it says something actually about politics in 26, which is, whereas once upon a time, policy would take a long time to set because the bureaucracy had to be in line with the leaders and everybody had to get buttoned up before they would move. We are now in an era where Mark Carney is sending text messages to Ursula von der Leyen and

Emmanuel Macron and all of the other leaders. And they are actually like trying to move these things because of the degree of geopolitical change much faster and the bureaucracies are actually struggling to catch up. And so what the leaders are doing here is setting the tone. You've got this bumper sticker now here, which is the associate membership could be offered, which is a long way to go. But it sets the tone. Now everybody has to kind of follow in its wake. And it says a lot about actually how just how the deck's been kind of scattered and how the new politics is being done in this era. I just want to be clear. But one thing you just said that the language around associate membership was agreed on by both sides, the European

side and the Canadian side. What we know is that von der Leyen only decided to use the associate membership language in the past couple of days, and the two sides had jointly discussed that possibility, both in the last couple of days and in previous weeks. I was just going to add that. I think Europe itself has been on an interesting journey. It's funny how this title, associate membership forces a conversation for both sides in Canada and for Europe. When this first came up, the Europeans were quite nervous about the title associate membership. Because one, it could potentially send a signal to countries that you can leave the EU, ask for a Canada-style deal, and get a bunch of benefits with a lot fewer of the burdens. And this is obviously, Europe is

obviously a continent still haunted by Brexit and they didn't want to create the precedent that, oh, if you don't like paying into the EU budget or accepting certain EU regulations, just walk away and demand a Canada-style deal. So they didn't want a term that signal that. And there were some worries. There were some concerns in Brussels that slowly could signal that. But I think the real upshot of this is just how much Trump has scrambled politics on both sides of the Atlantic. I think you have European officials thinking more creatively of how do we in Europe become more of a poll for our

reliable, like-minded democracies around the world. Australia has been mentioned as a potential, you know, chapter two in this story. And Canada really is the prototype for Europe finding a way to offer more flexible terms of inclusion for countries that aren't going to join as full members of the EU or its single market. Hi there, I'm Jamie Poisson, and my podcast, Front Burner, at the major news stories affecting Canada and the world. There is no shortage of important international news right now, but that is not the only type of news that matters.

So do local stories about your municipal elections across the GTA, your safety on the TTC, your affordable housing plans, which is why they deserve their very own podcast. This is Toronto is a weekly deep dive into the lives and issues that matter to Torontoians. Released every Wednesday and Friday and available wherever you get your podcast.

I want to ask you about some of the challenges in making this a reality. The first thing that comes to mind is that Canada and the EU have made a free trade agreement called CEDA, right? They've had it for almost a decade, but 10 EU countries, including France, Ireland, and Italy, still haven't ratified it. And if the EU can't get its own members to sign off on the current deal, will it really be able to deliver on something this ambitious? Yeah, I mean, that is one of the myriad obstacles here and one of the reasons to sort of buckle up for what will not be a smooth ride. You know, it is one thing for Europe's chief executive, Ursula Le Vondelian, to say, I opened the door to you becoming an associate member. It is another thing for 27 countries with their own parliaments, opposition parties, prime ministers, et cetera, to sign off on something. And it isn't clear because this isn't a thing that exists in the EU's treaties.

There's no legal prescription for what the road ahead looks like. And that's just one of the challenges. You have the issue of, I think there are EU officials who are looking at Carney and they're trying to figure out whether Canada is just using Europe as a prop in counter-negotiations with Washington. Now, that isn't at all the sense we get from Ottawa. We get a very clear sense that no, Mark Carney has felt for a very long time that the world is just too dependent. A world built for efficiency becomes overdependent on single hubs. And in this case, the United States, and I think there's sincerity there about wanting to find new partners, to find new fish in the sea.

But you still have that skepticism in some governments in Europe. And then you have the problem of, well, Ukraine is very wary of there being such a thing as associate member. Because they see that as a second-tier form of membership that they're going to get relegated to. They've shed blood to join Europe as a full member. And they're worried that you could create this other, like, European Union light thing that they get shunted off to when they want to be full flag-waving members. And then, of course, you have the Brexit example, too, of, you know, Europe can't offer Kearney terms so generous that other countries say, hey, we'd be better off walking away and demanding an agreement like the Canadians got. Yep, it's really interesting.

And then on top of that, you've just got the fundamentals and the kind of idea that is geography, destiny, which is the sort of way that we've understood international relations for a long time. And there's a huge gulf of water between Canada and the EU, even if they have a lot of materials and raw elements and services and goods that the other two want. And Canada, you know, still two-thirds of its exports go across the border. And I think it's so umbilical the link. It's so umbilical and it's just such a reality that it's been very hard for Canadians

and very hard for outsiders like us just looking at this to understand what it will even need to start disaggregating this and unraveling it. Ambillical's a bit of a loaded. It implies there's someone who cut one of those a couple of days ago. It applies someone who wants the mother, one's the offspring. Yes, it's a good point. I should say for people listening, Drew just had a baby just two days ago and we still made the time to talk to us. So we're very grateful.

Well, just on that point, Joe, we're in this very contentious trade war right now. And how do you think Carney's overtures to the EU might actually impact that? What have you heard about how the U.S. might respond to this? That's a great question. And it's actually been quite noteworthy the degree of, if not silence, then almost disinterest from the White House. The White House, the Trump administration, remains, I think, very focused on getting a trade deal with Canada. I think the White House believes, even if there's a pause at the moment, again, the reality of the geography and the connections between the two economies will bring Canada back to the table. When we asked the White House for comment on the story or to engage, they didn't want to give us a commentary and didn't want to get into details with us, but did raise the question.

about whether a deal with the EU would compromise Canadian sovereignty when they said the Canadians had been complaining that a deal with the US and the terms of the US proposed would undermine their sovereignty. And so I think they are in watch and wait mode at the moment and President Trump from his public comments, obviously, is continuing to sort of throw barbs at the Prime Minister. But it's interesting that they actually don't seem to have been paying it

as much attention as maybe it merits. And perhaps the announcement today and the trip this week and the comments from Prime Minister tomorrow may change that. Just on the sovereignty stuff, there's been quite a bit of concern here since you're reporting that a deal with the EU could actually require us to give up some degree of sovereignty. We want Canada to have free trade with Europe,

cooperation with Europe, but we'll never surrender our interests. independence and sovereignty over our laws, our tax money, and our immigration policies. Being in the EU means accepting certain limits on how you trade and following European laws and regulations. The opposition party has criticized the Prime Minister for moving forward or pushing ahead on this without a mandate to do so. Could associate membership require conceding elements of sovereignty? Yeah, I think this is how to put this.

Countries that join the EU do have to follow its regulations wholesale. They have to pay money into the EU budget. They have to accept the free movement of its workers. You can move from, I don't know, to pick a random example, Greece to Denmark. And those countries have to accept each other's citizens as workers, students, etc. I think what Canada is trying to do here is something different from joining the EU in that way. They're trying to link up with the EU and find specific sectors where there's a lot of complementarity. And yes, eventually European officials do envision that Canadian goods in certain geostrategic sectors could move frictionlessly across the Atlantic.

If you're talking about workers who deal in, you know, energy, AI, critical minerals that are needed for batteries, semiconductors, defense, all the things that both sides are looking to find reliable partners on. Yes. But this is a very difficult square to circle. And like Joe said, this is really the beginning of a story. Canadians should not expect at the end of this week for the EU to draw up a big sheet of paper that says this is what we're giving Canada. I think that both sides are looking to be creative and find ways that they can become more interdependent, on each other and less overly dependent on the U.S., on certain, like, very, you know, serious sectors like space, for example.

Just to interrogate this idea a little bit more, somewhat pointed to Norway as an example of the sovereignty risks here. Norway is not part of the EU, but joined the European economic area in the 90s. And this came with a so-called democratic deficit. Norway had to incorporate thousands of EU laws and regulations. into national law without having voting rights in the European Council, Commission or Parliament. And so, I mean, do you think that that's a fair comparison or do you think that people are kind of rightly concerned about that? I understand. What I can say is that Carney's team did map those deals that Norway, Switzerland and kind of other countries on the fringe of Europe, so to speak, have.

You have countries like Iceland is another example, where they accept EU regulations whole stuff. sale pretty much, but in return, they do retain some sovereignty of areas like fisheries, for example. I think what you're talking about is really the central challenge here, which is Europe, for decades, has had a fairly binary system. You are a member, you pay into the budget, you accept European regulations, or you are not, in which case, sure, we can do some free trade, you don't pay tariffs, maybe. That is basically the binary system.

I think that both sides here are thinking creatively, and are there ways that we can allow our people and goods to move more frictionlessly between our two sides of the ocean without Canada becoming the next star on the EU flag. I don't think anybody is talking about that. No one thinks that Canada is going to become a wholesale member of the European Union accepting all of its regulations. This is a tricky one. I mean, are people right to ask about this?

Sure, it's a very interesting, challenging geopolitical problem. And I would argue one of the most interesting and consequential problems in the world right now is how do countries that have traded with the U.S. and relied on it heavily for decades or longer find new relationships with each other without surrendering their sovereignty to one side's regulatory bodies or another? If there's an irony here, it's that the prime minister had a front row seat for this when he was the Bank of England governor as the UK left the European Union. And you were asking earlier about the White House and how they view this. I think this is really wonky stuff. It gets down to like rules of origin codes. It gets down to educational exchanges and the way that those work and the way degrees are recognized internationally. This is like really the fine print of the international and economic order that we've lived in.

And it's in that, for that reason, I think it's less like, like, jazz. than the word associate member. But I think it's actually what really matters. And I think the prime minister's office would be the first to say, we don't care what you call us. What we want are to lock into Europe in all the ways that we think would benefit. Not just Canada's economy, but it's society as well. Well, just as a final question to build off what you just said, you know, Carney first signaled the shift really when he gave that now famous speech in Davos, which we've talked about on this show before. We know the old order is not coming back.

We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers. The countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.

This all feels like very much part of it. of that shift. And what do you think this all means for not just Canada, but for this new world order that Carney described? I think when Carney said that Trump was transformative, I think that both sides would agree. I don't necessarily know whether or not he meant that as a compliment. I think it's just at this point, something that leaders around the world would see as a statement of fact. And what this means is, from my perspective, The U.S., an administration came into power, convinced that the old world order that it is revising, was not good for Americans. And it wanted to tear it up on a lot of ways, tear up ideas about trade that had become sort of baked into the political establishment over decades.

Implicit in that was an assumption that America would get to write the next world order. I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure. This stuff is really detailed, but obviously Canada and Europe are talking about that kind of thing. There is a new, I don't know, an international infrastructure that is being built in the wake of the transformation that's happened in the U.S. And Europe gets a vote and what the new world order looks like. Canada gets a vote. And this is, I think, an example of an alliance system that has become so badly strained, if not broken that its members are having conversations with each other and pursuing ideas that would

have been unthinkable even a few years ago. Yeah, I think that what today means in its own, you know, just kind of new cycle type way, it's another just important marker that I think is starting to convince even people who either were skeptical that the world was going to fundamentally change or wanted to believe that it wouldn't, that it is. And it seems to be speeding up. And it seems like the Europeans are on the same page as the Canadians and are making common cause and are now in a way that seems quite an anathema to the European Union starting to think flexibly. And I think that opens up all sorts of other opportunities. the European, people in the European Commission would, you know, spit out their coffee if you

talked about this too loudly. But it's probably no accident that we saw that yesterday, Australia also talked about having closer economic and security links with the European Union. The West, as we understood it during the Cold War, being Western Europe and North America against the communist bloc. The West, in the post-Cold War era, came to mean something that was not geographical. The West also includes Japan, it includes South Korea, of course, includes Australia and New Zealand. And so entirely new ideas of what alliances mean about what security and defense cooperation,

about sovereignty of things like data and AI in a world that's just getting started and it's hard to wrap your arms around, all these questions are in play. And I think Kani, with a couple of other European leaders, like-minded leaders, feel like it's a historic moment. The question is going to be whether they're up to it. Guys, this was great. It was such a pleasure to have you back on,

again. Thanks, Sammy. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Plesson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.