A Coalition of the Overtaxed, Underproductive and Over-Migrated
As someone who ultimately thinks Britain leaving the European Union was probably a good thing, I’m slightly dismayed to discover that the country I now live in is flirting with joining it.
Or sort of joining it, because nobody really knows what is being proposed yet.
Last week Ursula von der Leyen, Europe’s ultimate nepo baby bureaucrat and President of the democratically deficient European Commission, announced that she wanted to “open the door” for Canada to become the first associate member of the European Union, with Mark Carney sitting in the European Parliament receiving a standing ovation.
There’s just one slightly strange detail: EU associate membership doesn’t actually exist.
It’s not an established category of membership. There isn’t a document somewhere explaining what Canada would be signing up for, which European rules we’d have to follow, what obligations we’d assume, what institutions we’d participate in or what rights Europeans would acquire in Canada. We’re apparently going to work all of that out later. Which seems slightly backwards.
Because there is a version of closer European integration that I find appealing. If this means creating a much more integrated Canada-European market, I’m listening. Remove trade barriers. Make it easier for Canadian companies to sell into Europe. Recognize each other’s standards where sensible. Open procurement. Cooperate on defence, energy, technology, AI and critical minerals. Make it easier for professionals to work temporarily on either side of the Atlantic.
Canada desperately needs markets beyond the United States, and closer economic integration with hundreds of millions of wealthy European consumers seems like an obviously good idea.
But economic integration and political integration are very different things, and the history of the European Union is basically the story of what happens when you slowly blur the distinction.
The European project began with an incredibly compelling idea: tie European economies together, remove barriers to trade, create mutual prosperity and make another catastrophic European war economically almost impossible.
It’s difficult to argue with that, and by many measures it was extraordinarily successful. Had the European project remained essentially an enormous open market, I would have very little problem with it.
Let Europeans trade freely with one another. Let goods and capital move easily. Tear down pointless barriers between neighbouring economies and make it easier for businesses to operate across borders. Great. But why does any of that require becoming a political project?
I don’t want a European court sitting above national courts. I don’t want a European currency replacing national currencies. I don’t want an EU foreign policy gradually replacing national foreign policies, or the continuing push toward common European defence eventually becoming a European army. I certainly don’t need a European flag, a European anthem or the strange attempt to manufacture a European national identity on top of countries that already have identities stretching back centuries.
None of those things are necessary for Germans to sell cars in France. And that’s where I think the European project went wrong. Economic cooperation became a common market, the common market required common institutions, and those institutions accumulated regulations, courts and political authority. Each additional layer could be justified as a logical extension of the one before it.
At some point, you’ve moved from countries making it easier to trade with one another to a political system in which decisions made beyond your borders can determine things inside them.
Those are not the same proposition. And it’s one reason I think Britain was ultimately right to leave. I don’t think Britain rejected Europe. I think it rejected the idea that economic cooperation with Europe required Britain to become progressively less politically distinct from it.
Brexit was messy. Some of the promises made during the campaign were ridiculous, and Britain undoubtedly gave up certain economic advantages by leaving. But underneath all the noise was an incredibly important democratic question:
Who decides?
Who decides who enters your country, what regulations your businesses follow, what environmental and labour rules apply, what product standards you accept and, ultimately, who writes the laws?
Those decisions might be made brilliantly in Brussels (lol). That’s beside the point. British voters can throw the people in Westminster out. Canadians can throw the people in Ottawa out. We cannot throw the European Commission out.
And this becomes particularly important when you get to immigration, because there’s a version of European free movement that sounds fantastic to me. French people living in Germany, Germans moving to Italy, a Dutch engineer taking a job in Denmark, a Canadian designer spending five years in Paris. Wonderful.
I’d actually extend that principle further. Why shouldn’t Canadians be able to work more easily in Australia? Why shouldn’t Australians be able to spend a few years in Canada? Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have deep historical, institutional and cultural connections, and some kind of radically simplified mobility arrangement between them is intuitively attractive to me.
But reciprocal freedom of movement contains a problem that becomes more significant the larger the system becomes:
You’re no longer merely trusting another country’s citizens. You’re trusting its immigration and citizenship system.
Populations aren’t fixed. Every country decides whom it admits, whom it grants permanent residence and how long someone must live there before becoming a citizen.
In the European Union, once someone becomes a citizen of an EU member state, they’re also an EU citizen and acquire the associated freedom-of-movement rights. That means Spain’s citizenship policy eventually has implications for Germany. Germany’s has implications for France. France’s has implications for Sweden.
That’s not a criticism of the person moving. It’s simply a structural feature of the system, and it matters because European countries have pursued dramatically different immigration policies over the past decade.
Spain, for example, is currently undertaking an enormous regularization program for undocumented migrants, who appear to be mostly males from North Africa. To be clear, receiving Spanish residency does not immediately make somebody an EU citizen or give them unrestricted permanent movement throughout Europe. But citizenship eventually can.
Once you create genuine freedom of movement, every participating country’s decisions about immigration and citizenship therefore become relevant to everybody else.
The same problem would exist in my hypothetical Commonwealth mobility zone. If Canada and Australia have effectively open movement, Australia’s citizenship policy becomes, to some degree, Canada’s immigration policy. Canada’s becomes Australia’s. Britain’s becomes New Zealand’s.
That requires enormous mutual confidence in how every participating country manages immigration, citizenship and its external border. And to say my confidence in how many European countries have managed migration over the past decade is low would be an understatement. I really don’t want Canada inheriting any part of that system.
Otherwise you end up in the strange position of saying Canada controls Canadian immigration while decisions made by another government can eventually determine who acquires the right to live here.
That’s a sovereignty question, not an argument against the individual people moving. And Europe has spent the past decade discovering just how politically explosive that distinction can become.
Norway and Iceland are interesting here because their relationships with Europe are much more complicated than simply being “in” or “out.”
Neither country is an EU member, but both are deeply integrated into the European economy through the European Economic Area. They get extensive access to the single market, but that access comes with obligations. Norway, for example, implements a substantial amount of EU single-market legislation despite having no vote in the European Parliament or European Council.
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Think about how strange that arrangement is: you get many of the rules, but substantially less influence over writing them.
There are obvious benefits to that bargain, but there are also obvious democratic costs.
Iceland has wrestled with the same question. It’s deeply integrated with Europe through the EEA and Schengen while remaining outside the EU, and Icelanders just rejected reopening EU accession negotiations.
These countries aren’t anti-European. They’re European. They’re arguing about where economic integration should end and political sovereignty should begin. Canada should be having exactly the same conversation.
But there’s another reason I’m wary of this sudden European turn, and it’s economic. I completely understand why Canada wants to reduce its dependence on the United States. Trump has made the vulnerability of that relationship painfully obvious, and no serious country should be comfortable sending more than 70 percent of its goods exports to a single market forever.
Diversification makes sense. But there is something slightly strange about responding to problems in our relationship with the most dynamic major economy on earth by politically aligning ourselves more closely with an economic bloc whose own leaders are currently sounding the alarm about how badly it is falling behind.
Europe has a competitiveness problem. That’s not some MAGA talking point. The European Commission asked Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank and hardly a Eurosceptic firebrand, to produce a report on European competitiveness.
His diagnosis was not particularly cheerful. Europe has suffered from slowing productivity growth, an innovation gap with the United States, high energy costs, demographic pressures and chronic difficulty turning successful companies into global giants. European companies pay dramatically more for energy than their American competitors, and the EU itself now acknowledges that excessive regulation and administrative burdens are barriers to growth.
The European Commission is literally trying to simplify its own rules because it knows it has created too many of them. Then there’s tax. Taxes and social contributions amount to roughly 40 percent of EU GDP, with several major European economies considerably above that.
None of this means Europe is poor or economically irrelevant. Obviously it isn’t. Europe contains some of the richest, safest and most sophisticated societies in human history. It has extraordinary companies, extraordinary universities and hundreds of millions of affluent consumers.
I very much want Canadian companies selling things to them. But that’s precisely the distinction I keep coming back to:
I want the market. I’m considerably less interested in importing the model.
Canada already has a productivity problem. We already have high taxes. We already have a suffocating tendency toward bureaucracy and regulation. We already struggle to build housing, infrastructure and major projects with anything resembling urgency.
So when I hear that our grand response to a deteriorating relationship with the United States is to become an “associate member” of the European Union, my immediate reaction isn’t excitement.
It’s: are we sure we’re learning the right lesson here?
By all means diversify away from America. Sell more Canadian energy, minerals, technology, food and services into Europe. Sign better trade agreements. Remove barriers. Build ports. Build pipelines. Build the infrastructure required to actually become less dependent on the United States.
But diversifying our customers doesn’t require importing their political and regulatory architecture. And this is where my deliberately obnoxious description of the whole thing comes from:
A coalition of the overtaxed, underproductive and over-migrated.
Canada and Europe increasingly share some of the same problems. I’m not sure forming a club around them is the solution.
Which brings me back to the slightly bizarre way this has all arrived.
Ursula von der Leyen stands up and announces that Canada should become the first associate member of the European Union, despite “associate membership” not actually existing as a category in the EU treaties. The details, apparently, can be worked out later.
Who the fuck is Ursula von der Leyen to announce Canada’s new political relationship with Europe?
Obviously she cannot actually make Canada join anything. Mark Carney has said the eventual arrangement would go through Canada’s democratic processes, and any serious agreement of this kind should receive intense parliamentary scrutiny.
But the sequence still tells you something about the political culture surrounding these things.
First comes the summit. Then comes the grand announcement and the standing ovation. Then everybody goes home and figures out what “associate membership” actually means.
Who needs a parliament when you’ve got Davos, summits and international conferences?
And perhaps none of this should be surprising, because Mark Carney has always seemed extremely comfortable in this world. Central banks, Davos, international institutions, summits, transnational cooperation, technocratic solutions to problems that inconveniently refuse to remain inside national borders.
There are perfectly legitimate arguments for that worldview. But there’s also something about that political culture that makes enormously consequential questions feel like matters to be negotiated between the people attending the conferences rather than the people who have to live with the consequences. And this is precisely why the distinction between economic and political integration matters so much.
Maybe “associate membership” ultimately turns out to be a grandiose name for deeper trade, defence, energy and research cooperation. If that’s what it is, fantastic.
Let’s trade with Europe. Let’s build things with Europe. Let’s sell Europe energy. Let’s cooperate on defence. Let’s send Canadian students to Paris and French engineers to Toronto. Let’s make it ridiculously easy for Canadians and Europeans to do business together.
But if it means accepting regulations written by institutions Canadians don’t elect, that’s a different proposition. If it means progressively harmonizing political institutions, that’s a different proposition. If it means genuine freedom of movement, where another country’s citizenship decisions can eventually create rights of residence here, that’s a very different proposition. Because this is precisely how political integration happens.
It rarely arrives with somebody announcing that you’ve decided to surrender a portion of your sovereignty. It happens incrementally, because one agreement makes another agreement logical, one common standard creates the argument for another, and removing one barrier creates pressure to coordinate the next one.
Economic convenience gradually acquires political architecture.
Eventually something originally sold as a trading arrangement becomes a political system. Europe itself is the proof. And now Canada is being invited to become the inaugural member of a political category that doesn’t even exist yet.
As someone who watched the country I grew up in spend nearly half a century inside that project before eventually deciding to leave it, I find it slightly surreal that less than a decade later, the country where I now live might start wandering in the opposite direction.
So yes, open the European market.
Just be very careful about everything that comes attached to it.
