I don’t usually write posts this short, but some people are losing their minds and I think it’s important that everyone touch grass.
The Wall Street Journal has an article saying Mark Carney is seeking “associate membership” in the EU.
Several Conservative MPs, ranging from Roman Baber to Jamil Jivani to Pierre Poilievre, have addressed this news as evidence of Canada’s coming betrayal at Carney’s hands. In comically apocalyptic terms.
Problems with the WSJ article include (a) there’s no such thing as associate membership in the EU, though I suppose something could be cooked up; (b) every EU foundational text says only a “European State” can join the EU, which is interpreted as a geographical requirement and was grounds for rejecting Morocco in 1987. So Canada will never be in the EU and any “associate” thingie would be improvised, and should be judged on what it contains if it ever happens.
My best information from Carney’s office, after the last WSJ story about Carney, is that they find the WSJ prone to collecting torqued stuff from European sources who wish their lives were more exciting, and running it as gospel. Today some anonymous sources were telling other news organizations the new WSJ story is more of the same.
If the Conservative Party of Canada aspired to govern, it could ignore the WSJ story, which not one Canadian in 500 has read. Or it could write down 500 concrete questions of fact, discard 480 of them, and prepare to ask the good ones when they get a chance. Poilievre went straight to rickety parallel constructions on whatever they’re calling Twitter this week: “We will NEVER be the 51st U.S. state. And we will NEVER be the 28th EU state.” It is long past urgent for somebody to break out the Jaws of Life and pry the overheating smartphone from the twitching Conservative leader’s hands.
On social media, David Coletto is curtain-raising some polling he did on all of this. By a plurality, if invited to consider EU membership off the top of their heads, more Canadians think that sounds good than not. But it’s also impossible (see above). When the question is brought down to something more practical — closer Canada-EU relations broadly speaking — support grows to 8 to 1.
Lots of Conservatives campaigned for Brexit in their spare time in 2016. That’s their right, but they were wrong then and they are even more seriously on the wrong side of Canadian public opinion today than they were then. The party’s instincts on Europe are loser instincts.
You know who agrees with Roman Baber that Europe is “falling apart. Full of waste, over regulation & terrible immigration policy, where censorship thrives”? JD Vance, Elon Musk, and the Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Policy. For millions of other Canadians, Europe is a place. Or rather, dozens of places. Distant, sometimes expensive, but not that different from home.Baber’s X feed is fun to read: on Saturday it was BUT THE CHINESE and today it’s been BUT THE EURO-DECADENTS. Yeah, put that guy in charge of strategy!
There’s been chatter among Conservatives in recent weeks that Carney is trying to gin up an election issue. Maybe, they say, it’s America vs. Europe as a future dance partner for Canada. I hate to debate things that haven’t happened yet, but let’s just say that if we get to Christmas and Mark Carney has managed to force a federal election, whose goal would be to win him the majority he already has, I’ll owe you all a beer.
Stephen Harper is at Carney’s Investment Summit in Toronto. Stephen Harper negotiated an investment treaty with China. Stephen Harper pushed for free trade with Europe long before the Europeans wanted anything to do with it. And Stephen Harper is about five times stronger on pushing back against Trump than any prominent current Conservative MP seems to know how to be. Recent polling suggests Carney’s getting a lot of support from former Conservative voters. I have theories about why.
