{"id":35848,"date":"2026-05-07T16:43:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T16:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/35848\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T16:43:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T16:43:31","slug":"tasha-kheiriddin-mark-carney-the-european-prime-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/35848\/","title":{"rendered":"Tasha Kheiriddin: Mark Carney, the European prime minister"},"content":{"rendered":"

If it\u2019s Tuesday, this must be Belgium. If you\u2019re old enough to remember this 1969 film, where a busload of hapless tourists barrel across Europe on an 18-day tour of nine cities, you probably voted Liberal in the past election, like most of Canada\u2019s baby boomers. And you\u2019re probably happy<\/a>\u00a0with the way things are going\u00a0so far.\u00a0But you may not have expected\u00a0Prime Minister Mark Carney\u00a0to rack up quite so much time across the pond.<\/p>\n

In the first six months of his mandate,\u00a0Carney\u00a0made\u00a0five trips to Europe<\/a> covering 11 countries, and has travelled to the U.K., France, Switzerland and other nations in 2026. Last weekend he addressed a meeting of the European Political Community<\/a> in Yerevan, Armenia \u2014 a first for a non-European leader. Carney also been\u00a0asked to address<\/a> the European Parliament later this year. In fairness, Justin Trudeau did so twice \u2014 but in Carney\u2019s case, the invite carries a different vibe.<\/p>\n

The prime minister\u2019s pivot to Europe is not just economic, but personal and political. Carney spent a large part of his career as governor of the Bank of England and the United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. His first foreign trip was to Europe<\/a> to meet French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer \u2014 a nod to Canada\u2019s dual French-English heritage, but also a message to Washington that Canada has other friends.<\/p>\n

But will this pivot work? In 1957, prime minister John Diefenbaker explored stronger economic links with Britain, while in the 1970s prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau advanced a \u201cThird Option\u201d<\/a> strategy to diversify trade away from the U.S. after the so-called \u201cNixon shocks,\u201d which subjected Canada to 10 per cent tariffs. Neither effort bore much fruit, and in the 1980s prime minister Brian Mulroney pursued greater economic integration with the United States, ultimately signing our first bilateral free trade deal<\/a>\u00a0in 1987, and boosting\u00a0Canada\u2019s annual GDP\u00a0by\u00a0$1.1 trillion<\/a>\u00a0over the following 25 years.<\/p>\n

Canada\u00a0also\u00a0already\u00a0has\u00a0trade agreements<\/a> with both the EU and the U.K., signed in 2017 and 2021 respectively, and 98 per cent of our goods now enter the EU tariff-free. Canada\u2019s merchandise exports to the EU have since increased<\/a> by 57 per cent since 2015, reaching $34 billion, and the U.K. is our third largest trading partner, with trade valued at $61 billion in 2024<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But we\u00a0apparently\u00a0cannot\u00a0have enough of a good thing. Since Trump took office, Carney has been on a tear, inking\u00a0the\u00a0New European Union (EU)-Canada Strategic Partnership of the Future<\/a>\u00a0and a\u00a0Security and Defense Partnership<\/a>,\u00a0and becoming the first\u00a0non-European country to join the\u00a0EU\u2019s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative<\/a> to boost Canadian defence sales.<\/p>\n

The next step, of course, would be formal application to join the EU \u2014 something that is not impossible (Turkey is not technically a European country, and was allowed to apply<\/a>) \u2014 but also not advisable. Membership would require adopting thousands of European laws and strict environmental and agricultural standards. We would have to apply EU tariffs on trading partners including the U.S., and open our doors to the EU\u2019s 450 million people as potential workers, migrants, and students \u2014 at a time when we are cutting immigration to curb housing and employment shortages.<\/p>\n

Carney\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0only flirting with Europe, of course;\u00a0he\u2019s\u00a0also making\u00a0eyes\u00a0at\u00a0China, which has\u00a0raised\u00a0eyebrows<\/a> in Washington. But his penchant for Europe is attracting American attention, too: The New York Times carried a big story<\/a> this week in which the president of the EU describes Canada as a desirable source of energy and critical minerals \u2014 the very same resources coveted by our neighbour to the south.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Carney sees a bigger bond with Brussels as leverage in our renegotiation of CUSMA; perhaps he sees it as Plan B should that deal fall apart. But either way, his first job is to ensure tariff-free trade with our biggest consumer \u2014 and that\u2019s not Belgium.<\/p>\n

Tasha Kheiriddin is Postmedia\u2019s national politics columnist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If it\u2019s Tuesday, this must be Belgium. If you\u2019re old enough to remember this 1969 film, where a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[17,7971,14035,2015,11688,127,111,15683,14070],"class_list":{"0":"post-35848","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mark-carney","8":"tag-canada","9":"tag-economic-integration","10":"tag-emmanuel-macron","11":"tag-european-parliament","12":"tag-european-political-community","13":"tag-justin-trudeau","14":"tag-mark-carney","15":"tag-prime-minister-keir-starmer","16":"tag-the-eu"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}