Posted on 10/01/2026 9:35:57 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is in Strasbourg this week selling a “unique alliance” with the European Union while courting Chinese capital at home. The pitch is straightforward: President Trump’s tariffs and “51st state” taunts make Canada’s century-old economic marriage to the United States too risky. Thus, Canada should diversify toward Brussels and Beijing.
One massive problem: geography, capital flows, language, and supply chains dictate otherwise. These harsh facts on the ground make the European Union option, in particular, a political fantasy.
Canada cannot join the European Union. The EU treaties limit membership to a “European state.” Associate membership — the novel status European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen floated with Carney in the room — does not exist in European Union law. Creating it, or concluding a deep association agreement, requires unanimity in the Council and, in practice, mixed-agreement ratification by all 27 member states. That is the same hurdle that has left the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada, provisionally applied since 2017, still unratified by ten countries, including France. Any new “alliance for the future” covering defense industry, critical minerals, artificial intelligence and the Arctic will face the same veto. Calling Carney’s EU opening a fool’s errand is an understatement.
On the other hand, Canadian exports to China jumped 30 percent in the first half of 2026, driven by energy and minerals. Carney’s January deal traded limited Chinese electric-vehicle access for lower canola tariffs and a goal of 50 percent export growth by 2030. Chinese state-backed funds showed up at this week’s Toronto investment summit. But Ottawa treated the Chinese market as a security risk for years — for prudent reasons. And Canada swinging the trade doors open to China will certainly draw American retaliation. What the China opening does not do is reroute oil pipelines or auto parts.
The United States remains Canada’s gravitational center. Roughly 75 percent of Canadian goods exports have historically gone south; even after tariffs, America still dominates. Manufacturing is only 10 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product, but it is the high-wage, integrated part of the economy that Europe cannot absorb. Ontario auto parts do not slot into just-in-time chains in Slovakia or North Africa.
American investors hold about 46 percent of the stock of foreign direct investment in Canada and supplied more than half of 2025 investment inflows. Canadian companies hold nearly half their outbound foreign direct investment in the United States.
Further, Canada’s deteriorating business climate, the inevitable result of decades of left-wing misrule, has encouraged capital to flow south. A KPMG survey found 42 percent of Canadian manufacturers have already moved production to the U.S. or plan to, with 77 percent expecting to act within two years.
As for energy, Canadian heavy crude is refined in the United States Midwest and Gulf Coast; there are no East Coast export terminals. And the proposed Canadian pipeline that would have allowed that, Energy East, is dead. Canada has 840,000 kilometers of pipelines pointing south. Reversing that takes 15-20 years and capital that is not coming from Brussels.
English, contiguous borders, shared time zones, and North American Aerospace Defense Command have largely hardwired the U.S. and Canada. Europe and China cannot transcend these ties.
Trump’s rhetoric (a negotiation tactic?) is deliberately humiliating — “Governor Carney,” maps painted in Stars and Stripes, jokes about annexation. It works as leverage because the dependence is asymmetric. Canada treats United States market access as existential. Washington treats Canadian supply as convenient. The United States can source heavy oil from Venezuela, shift more auto production to Mexico, and live with higher lumber prices. Carney’s talk does not create pipelines or factories.
Defense exposes the same gap between aspiration and capacity. Canada finally hit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s old 2 percent of gross domestic product target in 2025-26 after decades as a free-rider. Carney now talks of 4 percent by 2030 and the alliance’s new 5 percent goal by 2035. Spending more does not instantly produce ships or fit soldiers. Internal briefings in 2024 showed 72 percent of Canadian Armed Forces personnel overweight or obese — worse than the civilian population.
Readiness and medical releases suffer. The navy still operates four aging Victoria-class submarines, with the first of a planned 12 German boats not due until 2034. Polar icebreakers are under construction but will not arrive until the early 2030s. The existing Coast Guard icebreaker fleet is mixed and aging. Canada’s Arctic is vast; its ability to patrol it year-round remains thin at best. So long as Canada’s military cannot independently enforce sovereignty in the Arctic, its lecturing others about alliances wears thin.
Carney’s bet is that shared values with Europe and commodity demand from China can buy time. But time for what? Does Carney expect a new Democratic president in Washington to be accommodating to Canadian trade barriers and anemic defense spending? That’s likely a bad bet.
Yeah, because humiliating your friends is the best way to maintain a long-term working relationship./s
Isn’t Carney some sort of shyster banker?
The mouse who roared.
See how many hockey sticks Brussels wants to buy
Is it true Kan-Uh-Duh is harboring 500K Chinese troops?
If so WTH ! (saw a program with a pastor from there said this)
So is free riding on your friends and imposing asymmetric trade barriers such as language requirements, trying to impose special taxes on media/tech companies, erecting huge tariff barriers to keep dairy products out, banning the sale of alcohol products from that country and crowds booing their national anthem at sporting events.
Canada isn’t sliding left, it’s plummeting.
A July study showed 1/4 of (young) Canadians view COMMUNISM favorably.
I can get Maple syrup from Maine or VT so I am all set.
And US crowds never boo the Canadian national anthem (hint - they do).
“Yeah, because humiliating your friends…”
Canada isn’t a friend. Carney has made that quite clear.
L
Remember all of the US draft dodger losers who moved to Canada in the 60’s? I wonder how they and their offspring influence Canada attitudes?
Good, good, good.
Now apply the same reasoning to the USA getting its potash from a Belarus that (a) doesn’t have a surplus to sell to the USA, and (b) doesn’t even like the USA, and (c) is logistically as awkward to import from as, say, the Central-Europe-to-Canada example.
The only problem between Canada and the USA right now is President Trump is the kind of person who thinks that
1. if you spend $100 on buying something you actually need, you are “losing” $100, and if you decide not to buy it, you’re “making” $100.
2. if you buy a car from a car dealership and they don’t buy a similar value car back off you, the trade is not reciprocal therefore it’s not fair.
3. if you sell a thousand glasses of orange juice from a market stall and make enough money to buy a TV with the money, then you owe something more to the person selling the TV just because you got to sell 1000x as many things as he did.
Which is, to say the least, a rather unorthodox take on how trade should work.
Unfortunately, it’s all three things in concert that have Trump convinced that tariffs that HE HIMSELF APPROVED OF are unfair even if they never actually applied in practice, that it’s sooo unfair that the USA can’t just order Canuckistan to buy 10x as much milk from the USA as it actually needs, and so on and so forth...
By the time you get to the real root cause of the trade dispute between Canada and Trump, it literally boils down to the most chauvinistic mindset of any American administration since World War One.
It’s literally like arguing “Canada Is Smaller Than America, so America should have a license to use its size advantage to shaft Canada in every possible direction, but since America *doesn’t* shaft Canada then this proves Canada is being bad to America, and must be punished”.
Canada isn't a friend. Carney
Carney got elected because Trump posted the 51st State nonsense. Instead of a more friendly conservative led Canadian government we ended up with Carney.
They will take it—immediately after the midterms. The Democrat party is advising them, imho.
The “conservative” distanced himself from Trump immediately before the elections. Remember?
Trump doesn’t vote in Canada; the Canadian people do. They got what they voted for.
Wisconsin produces some great maple syrup. As far as I can tell they are not large scale operations. When home we buy it at cheese factories or butcher shops. Most are in what look like old whiskey bottles with stick on labels. Wife swears by it.
We have always had better relations with conservative led Canadian governments.
I don't doubt its happened...but nowhere near as often. Americans never define themselves as being "not Canadian". They don't have the massive inferiority complex Canadians do.
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