By Tammy Nemeth, published by the Financial Post
In Brief by Probe Media
The warm optics of Mark Carney’s presence at Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address should not obscure a more basic fact: the countries that live next door to the EU — Iceland and Norway — already enjoy deep single-market privileges and keep declining further integration. Why is that?
Canada already enjoys exceptional trade access and defence co-operation. This includes CETA, which removes tariffs on most goods and opens some services and procurement without the EEA’s central cost: adopting Brussels rules written without a Canadian vote. Added to that is the 2025 security and defence partnership, as well as Canada’s unique non-European access to the EU’s SAFE defence instrument.
Why would Prime Minister Mark Carney want to further the country’s association at the risk of importing the EU’s regulatory corpus—Green Deal, Fit for 55, and the rest—onto the sectors that define the Canadian economy? Trade on existing terms is valuable. Quiet conscription of Canadian resource policy into a continental regulatory hierarchy designed for a different geography is not.
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