One thing that is common about middle democracies is that prioritize a bureaucratic elite structure over an entrepreneurship culture, while both the US and China embrace entreprenuership wholeheartedly.
If they changed that they'd perhaps become world powers themselves.
> One thing that is common about middle democracies is that prioritize a bureaucratic elite structure over an entrepreneurship culture
No, that's just the 2010s propaganda fed to you by people who assert that not letting them do whatever they want is "bureaucratic". These very same people are completely fine lobbying legislature for more moat when they benefit from it.
The difference between "middle democracies" or whatever that means and the US is just that politics aren't corrupted enough yet that they can buy whatever they want.
Heavily country-dependent, in practice. The UK lets you set up a company online cheaply, quickly, and filing is easy. Insurance is plentiful and sensible, as are business bank accounts. The law is mostly straight-forward. Setting up a German limited-liability company OTOH involves putting down some ghastly large sum as a guarantee.
But yes, Americans are told they have the freest speech and the freest markets, and don't seem to question either.
I live in one, it's definitely true. It doesn't mean entrepreneurship doesn't exist, but there is a lot of bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is iron law. They will go to any extreme to make reality align with the bureaucracy. For example if you build a building without permission, the police will come by with a bulldozer, demolish your building, dispose of the remains, and then bill you for it. Even if the building is hosting the world's first AGI, or whatever extremely important thing you can think of - there is no excuse for not complying with the bureaucracy. Whereas the US would allow you to keep it and maybe pay a fine.
> but there is a lot of bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is iron law.
Yeah, an organized and powerful administration is the basis of rule-of-law system. The opposite isn't entrepreneurship, it's a state of widespread corruption where laws are toothless.
It doesn't benefit upstarts who want a fair environment to start a business, it benefits megacorps with their own militia of lawyers to bend the rules, and pockets deep enough to lobby for the removal of rules that can't be bent.
The optimal amount of crime is not zero. If someone does an illegal thing but it turns out to be good for society, it should be permitted, then legalized.
Think of AI copyright infringement. You know why the AI labs are in the USA and China and not in Europe.
You clearly don't pay attention to Canadian politics. Canada basically let McKinsey run their immigration policy[1][2] for 10 years and has now appointed the former CEO of McKinsey[3] to a business development role in government. I wouldn't say that Canada is just a satellite office of McKinsey, but it's getting closer.
Canada is corrupt as hell, just no one cares so it doesn't make international news.
It's pretty clear the echo chamber you emerge from (protip - move to the US. I am 100% serious), but this is comical.
When your examples of Canada being "corrupt as hell" are such chickenshit nonsense, it betrays that you're just a partisan zealot that has literally zero sense of scale or reason.
McKinsey, a massive consulting firm, had a whole $32M in business with the government? Holy shit, basically the deep state! Sounds like the globalist infiltrated the government!
The SNC thing was embarrassing, but it was over its behaviour overseas (Libya, to be precise, where a dictator's family got wined and dined), and the government was concerned about a massive, major Canadian firm being crippled by domestic hand wringing.
When that is what you have to offer up for Canada being "corrupt as hell", in comparison to criminal shitholes like the US (which you think is much better, as you've explained elsewhere), wow. Back to shitty subreddits where your tiny group of laughable farces have your discussions about how dire things are.
I say it with absolute conviction that I desperately want every "Canada is broken" jackal like you to pack up and move South of the border.
It's interesting to me that people generally see Europe's regulations as interfering with entrepreneurship, while they see American decisions that give more power to multinational corporations at the expense of smaller companies as a normal part of a free market.
That's unfettered capitalism at work—"free" implies no bounds. Multinational corporations have never been more powerful now than at anytime in history.
And that hurts the free market. A free market should be transparent, have low barriers to entry, and not be dominated by monopolies or cartels. There's nothing free about American capitalism.
Your implied premise is that private companies cannot impede others' freedom, which isn't true. In unfettered capitalism, only the largest corporations have the power and money to be free.
Starting a company is not the hard part of staring a company in any country. Many many companies do exist in the EU. It might be annoying but it's obviously hardly insurmountable.
You're getting downvoted now, but it's the Europeans who are running out of money for healthcare and public services (and voting for neo-fascist parties promising fixes that will never come).
European sentiment is totally out of touch with European reality. They'll post gleefully online about how much better their life is and then go back to their sardine flat where they can't afford to pay for heating, and it never ever occurs to them to reconsider any priors. They'll huff copium on Reddit about how bad American healthcare is, while waiting for years for desperately needed surgeries, paying far more for healthcare by way of taxes than any American does.
Are their ideas out of touch? No, it's reality that's wrong.
Go do some research on China - it's economy is in the toilet and its leadership has destroyed much of it's success, foreign capital and companies have fled to India, Vietnam, Mexico, Indonesia.
Your lament of "Oh no China is the best in the world and only getting better!!!" is long long out of date.
With 2 billion people you’re absolute power. Internal market with middle class size of whole United States. No need for wallstreet and American style financial engineering. Producer of 80% goods for Europe. I mean buying something mainstream not made in China is barely possible. Technically there are some challenges like plane engines or lithography. But they’ll nail it. Trust me.
I mean..."close to true" is another way of saying "false". It could easily have been phrased in a way that was actually true and gotten plenty of upvotes instead.
Polish export to US is about 3% of its total export and import - about 5% of Poland's total import. Not much to lose, honestly. We trade more with Czech Republic.
Polish export to EU is 74% of its total export and import is about 60% of its total import.
Economically - whatever's good for EU is good for Poland and US barely matters.
What about the importance of that trade. The US exports a lot of critical things that cannot be supplied from elsewhere. Everyone is heavily reliant on American technology.
I’ve always been told don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and the journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step.
The lesson here is that you can’t rely on the US anymore. Not for military protection, not for defence procurement, and not for trade or supply chain. That legacy has ended entirely by choice of the United States.
The problem has moved beyond monetary trade value and into existential risk.
Exports are really easy to move and replace, as has been proven again and again in the past two years. Turns out that imports can be far trickier and pose larger problems to an economy.
In 1960, 75% of Ireland's exports went to the UK, and 50% of its imports came from there. By 2000, it was 35% imports, 25% exports. Today it is 20% imports, 8% exports. There are a few things going on here, but a lot of it was EU membership giving Ireland options beyond its 'natural' trade partner (and then the big drop from 2000 to now was mostly Brexit).
Being in a situation where 70% of your exports go to one country is arguably pretty unhealthy; that is something that Canada would do well to work towards reducing, even _if_ the US administration wasn't openly hostile.
Trump is a symptom not the disease, when he's gone the people who supported him and voted for him still exist and another Trump-like figure is almost inevitable given they've basically ploughed and planted that field to grow the next one and who's to say NeoTrump isn't going to be smarter.
The other democracies can no longer count on the US as a stable ally the way we have in the past (whether that trust was misplaced is a matter of perspective).
Simply put, you did it twice, We can't rely on them not doing it again.
When Hitler was removed did another Hitler variant take control of Germany? No, Germany recovered from that dark period. The same will happen in the US. We will recover from this dark period. The comparison to Hitler is not baseless, btw. His own vice president once called Trump America's Hitler.
If you mean after facing bitter defeat, being broken into two nations, being controlled directly by foreign powers for years (and on one side decades), paying reparations, its upper political class and collaborators seized, jailed, trialed, and the free side being afraid of annexation by Russia, having nazism and any artifacts outlawed, then yes.
Yes, after all and more, no future Hitler has yet emerged.
Unless you see these things happening soon, then not really a good comparison.
No, because he was removed at gunpoint (no, not the one he pointed at himself). Unless and until that happens to a US President, you can expect more of the same.
It doesn't need to be a trump like figure. I would temper expectations that anything for Europe or Canada goes back to some status quo. It's more likely for Canada, but the US has changes domestically and with regards to other foreign nations in ways that necessitate different foreign relations even with close allies.
We can look at Biden. He's not a trump like figure by any stretch. He decided to continue some of Trump's foreign policy.
This has been brewing since George W Bush. Obama made a valiant attempt at normalising relations with Europe but I don't think any future US president has any hope of reversing this now.
Petro-states are destroying their trust as they try desperately to cling on to the power fossil fuels have given them. Thankfully this makes renewables even more attractive than just their lower cost.
The world was already moving on from US hegemony. China is already a super power, other economies are growing, and the west in general (i.e. all the countries mentioned here) are a shrinking proportion of the world economy (and population, or military strength).
The collapse of the USA as the world leader was already happening, but plenty of countries were under the impression the USA and the other western countries were working together to save the sinking ship.
The USA did plenty of offensive stuff before that (like a full campaign labeling the French as cowards for not supporting their baseless war in the middle east), but it took until Trump and his unhinged behaviour for the world to see how bad the situation really was.
> This world needs more cooperation and friendship.
There's no such thing as "friendship" and geopolitics. Everyone should have learned this by now.
To use the Oracle example, USA is like a lawn mower. If you grease the wheels and keep the gas tank full then it will mow your lawn. But if you stick your hands in the blades then it will cut your fingers off.
> I thought Turkey or North Africa would be the next steps. Maybe Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Not white enough for the EU. There is a lot of opposition to even Turkey, which is already in customs union, joining and talks are dead specifically because EU countries do not want immigration from Turkey.
Many European countries already have substantial Turkish migration. Notably Germany but also visible in the UK, where they seem to have cornerned the market for barbering.
Talks with Turkey are currently dead because the current government does not wish to continue them; realistically they won't resume until, at the earliest, Erdogan is gone.
Turkey has been floated as a serious EU candidate for decades now. Most of it is not in Europe of course, and it has a large population. Turkey refuses to address its past with the Armenians, Kurds and Greeks which is a major concern.
The other question is what its border control is like at the eastern end.
There are already large numbers of Turks in western Europe, particularly Germany, so presumably some of them would vote for it.
It's not just been floated; Turkey was (and strictly speaking still is, though talks are suspended because Erdogan) an official candidate, in the accession process.
I think in recent times we realized that culture is still very important and just doing realpolitik alone does not work. Turkey and North Africa are way too foreign and bring more problem than benefits.
I wouldn't be surprised if Scotland eventually leaves UK and joins the EU. Part of the reason they voted to stay in the UK was so that they could remain in the EU, and then brexit happened
They would then have a hard border with England, and would have to untangle their economy from the UK to some extent, which would be extremely disruptive. There will also be complex issues around who gets which citizenship, who would need work visas, a change of currency, etc.
It was known that there was likely to be a Brexit referendum at the time of the Scottish referendum: Cameron had promised one if the Conservatives won the 2015 election.
I'm proud to live in the EU because for all its faults we have one thing going for us, we seem to be the only large institution that countries still want to voluntarily join, and can voluntarily leave.
In a world in which the other great powers revive the Monroe Doctrine or threaten their magnitude smaller neighbors with annexation we're not doing so badly. There is an inherent pettiness, weakness and fake strength in autocracy and force and it's often why I think the EU receives so much disproportionate hate.
CUSMA is just a trade deal, not a full-on organization like the EU.
If we're doing a trade deal measuring contest, I will just point out that the EU has the world's largest free trade network, including Canada (already), South Korea, most of Latin America, India etc etc.
NATO is an organisation and people want to join it - and it has more countries than the EU.
Let me guess: NATO doesn't count because...
Sorry, the EU does not have any special mythical status that does not apply to other organisations, unless you want to play word games so it's the only one that even qualifies.
Apples, Oranges etc once again. Of course NATO is a completely different kind of organization from the EU.
The Catholic Church has more members than NATO, too, but it's a completely nonsensical comparison.
The EU doesn't have some mythical status that doesn't apply to any other organization, it just has a very specific status in political science that it's the most successful example of: Supranationalism.
Anyways, why are we doing this silly phallus size competition in the first place? Can't we just accept that the EU is a major player on the world stage and that people look up to it?
The EU feels like an incomplete experiment. Not strong enough to actually be a single market. But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones.
The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
EU already has uniform regulations, what are you talking about? It's also the third largest economy in the world, as uncompetitive as it is.
> It's also the third largest economy in the world
If going by GDP (which this claim usually does), the EU as a whole beats out China for second place by ~10%. When going by individual countries Germany alone is the third place behind China, though with a large gap between the two.
Consider: the US is a (somewhat) greenfield project, while the EU is a brownfield refactoring.
These sorts of refactorings take time, even more so if done by "committee". The good thing is that explicit interfaces have to be created thereby (hopefully) increasing adaptability and resilience over time.
> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
I agree, but there are huge barriers to taking this step. You need a common identity to create a nation. Americans have one, so do other large nations. The EU does not.
"But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones."
It seems to me the EU is overburdened with trivial regulations (like regulating the maximum power consumption of domestic vacuum cleaners) rather than prioritizing core issues of its single market, manufacturing, trade, etc.
Trouble is small vested interests hold overly powerful sway over EU-wide policy. The example above is a case in point, individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted.
You're correct, annoying regulations are bloating the EU bureaucracy making it lethargic and uncompetitive.
> individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted.
People proclaim this with such confidence, especially in the UK before the Brexit years I must say, and yet there are so many arguments against it.
First, accepting this goes against a core tenet of the single market, since the single market for vacuum cleaners is now split into 27 little markets. We thus need 27 regulatory bodies to each investigate, and then make a political decision, on the maximum power setting of domestic vacuum cleaners. Then, producers in China will have to make (up to) 27 different models of vacuum cleaners. This is certainly not going to be cheaper, completely destroys the famous Brussels effect [0], all for some token amount of "sovereignty".
Nations states can sovereignly decide to delegate this process of rule making to Brussels, and domestic vacuum cleaners are a perfectly mundane "case in point" to showcase the benefits of this process. The EU is far from a perfect union, but throwing these frankly naive arguments around will not help it much.
Nation states are also free, in practice, to ignore any regulation they don't like and implement their own. Hungary did this for a decade. They usually don't, because there is no benefit to ignoring the more widespread setting on maximum vacuum cleaner power.
Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo. There’s plenty of good ingredients, plenty of challenges too. It can still go either way. Hell, at this rate it might outperform simply because US and China blow up due to domestic problems.
The thing about mojo is that it’s super hard to predict. It might stay where it is and Europe’s share of global GDP might decline to nothing. Or it might rekindle out of nowhere due to some impulse.
Either way, middle democracies are a somewhat threatened species now, and from their individual PoV an imperfect union might be much better than efficiently staying on their own.
There are deeper structural problems when you look at the incentives inherent to government driven society.
While I do appreciate and even support the idea that the immense wealth available on planet earth should be more evenly distributed, and people should mostly be focused on raising families, deepening their philosophy, and perfecting their craft... (some societies in Europe are pretty laid back in terms of hyper-productivity culture)
Regulation is possible without paralyzing industry. Laws about the internet are possible without stifling freedom. Central planning is possible without crashing the economy so bad you end up with a regime change. It all comes down to execution and for the most part, it's been a series of failed experiments.
As much as I want a happy future for Canadians and Europeans, I just don't see the odds being super favourable.
Dunno. My impression is that with the EU, we pick its suboptimal parts and compare them to what they could be with optimal execution.
We don’t look either at the successful parts, not at the world where it is wholesale gone. My gut feeling is that EU members are, on the whole, much better off for being in than out. One natural experiment is the UK - opinions differ, but the drastic accumulation of problems coincides with Brexit timings.
I’m all for improving the EU! And for sure there are bad bits. But when your car AC is doing badly, you don’t write off the car. You try to fix the AC…
The EU shouldn't become the US. EU countries are sovereign, with the practical right to completely ignore what the EU tells them to do, and this is a good thing for now. If an EU country legalizes weed, federal troopers do not march in, arrest all the weed dispensary owners and march them to federal prison because those things don't exist.
You guys are clueless. Just because you don't understand the org and why it isn't exactly like the US doesn't make your vague misplaced opinions valid.
What alternative is there? The Americans are not an option anymore. It seems sensible to me that we want to get very close to one major power, and more close to everything else. Diversification.
> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
But also:
> The European Union has a nominal GDP of roughly $20 trillion, placing it closely on par with or slightly ahead of China ($19 trillion), but smaller than the United States ($30–$31 trillion)
I don't know about you but the same GDP as China sounds economically successful... or not?
It is and it isn't. Around 15-20 years ago, the EU economy was actually bigger than the US economy in total terms (not per capita). The issue is that the EU has stagnated, as has canada while the USA has been pulling away. Growth has been pretty terrible for both for a long time.
From Blackberry to a budding VFX industry and many other sustainable businesses to come out of Canada has always made it seem like a very EU-like philosophy. This will be great for fair trade.
From having worked extensively in it, the VFX industry, apart from being near to Hollywood in terms of time zone, is surely just a tax rebate competition. Which is actually very non-EU philosophy; member states cannot simply subsidise local industries from tax revenue - it is a single market, other members have to have equal access to your market as your local companies.
Of course there's plenty of ways around it. In the case of film production, if the script calls for the characters to be in a specific location - then it's now a cultural asset that the government can fund with rebates. The person writing the script is of course aware of this and the incentives available.
I mean Blackberry is long gone and missed its full potential, VFX industry only exists there temporarily because of tax credits, once a better deal is offered elsewhere all that will up and leave that’s how that industry works. Not to mention AI is going to obliterate large VFX teams for a lot of productions.
So neither of these are good sustainable examples.
No idea what this actually means, if it means easier trade, I'm all for anything that reduces our dependency on the yanks, as long as we don't need to be involved in their regulatory or legal regimes. The Americans are no longer our friends, Salut, mes amis Européens. :)
> as long as we don't need to be involved in their regulatory or legal regimes
The only reason the trade is easy in EU (and with it non-EU partners) is these regulations. Countries that choose to stay outside but wanted access to our market (like Norway, Switzerland, etc.) - had to accept the regulations. So I highly doubt you'll get your wish.
Carney was asking for freedom of movement of goods, people and services, but without full monetary and legislative integration.
So, easier to sell stuff, easier to buy stuff, free to just travel to/from Canada/EU and work there with no extra paperwork, free to buy and sell service from Canada to EU and vice versa.
No Euro, no vote in EU, no ECJ, no payments into each others budget.
Tighter integration than UK, not as tight as Norway/Switzerland/Iceland.
Common defense was already agreed anyhow.
I can tell you this enjoys broad support in the EU public. Although, no joke, a lot of peoples first reaction is: "They need to compete in Eurovision first. Otherwise they should wait for Australia to join first."
> Tighter integration than UK, not as tight as Norway/Switzerland/Iceland.
This will not work as Norway and Switzerland pay. I am unsure about the UK whether they pay or not, but anything else would be unfair to Norway and Switzerland.
> Common defense was already agreed anyhow.
Where and how? Surely not via the EU because the EU has no power over that. See how Austria is part of the EU but militarily neutral.
> I can tell you this enjoys broad support in the EU public. Although, no joke, a lot of peoples first reaction is: "They need to compete in Eurovision first. Otherwise they should wait for Australia to join first."
Canada is much more appreciated than the USA here, but you need to look at all fine details. Right now it seems to me that e. g. Carney, and Leyen, use this more as promo-tour. Nothing against Canada moving closer to the EU, mind you, but this here seems a lot more show-value centered than "show us the details". Because what are the exact details here? I am all in favour of countries cooperating more now that the USA has gone fully rogue, but politicians love show and entertainment.
Eurovision is also stupid. Why is Israel part of it? That makes zero sense, even way aside from what war criminal Netanyahu is doing - it's not a european country. Something is wrong with the word EU. It constantly seeks to expand. So that is now a misnomer.
Israel's public broadcaster is a long time member of the European Broadcasting Union, which has nothing to do with EU, and honestly not all that much to do with Europe either. EBU organizes Eurovision. Why Israel's public broadcaster wanted to be part of EBU I don't know, cultural identification with Europe I guess? You'd have to ask them.
But either way that's not the scandal. The scandal is that Russia's broadcaster got kicked out for Russia doing bad things (fair enough) but Israel's was kept in despite their government doing even worse things.
Yeah, the scandal is about different members being held to different standards. Why are Azerbaijan and Israel allowed to stay while Russia got kicked out? Especially since Azerbaijan and Israel both have manipulated the voting in addition to waging wars.
Simple, for one the ITU region assignment, there's a bunch of other countries in Africa and Asia that are in the European Broacasting Area and thus eligible to join the EBU.
The other thing more applies to other sports like soccer, most Arab countries (but especially Iran) will not accept having to work with Israel because it would require them to accept Israel as a legitimate country.
> Eurovision is also stupid. Why is Israel part of it? That makes zero sense, even way aside from what war criminal Netanyahu is doing - it's not a european country. Something is wrong with the word EU. It constantly seeks to expand. So that is now a misnomer.
Eligibility to compete is not based on country, but my membership to the European Braodcasting Union of which Israel is a member, and Australian SBS is an associate member and was allowed to compete as a special case.
Don't bring Eurovision into it. Learn to lighten up and have some fun instead.
Agree, any country in the world should be able to participate in ESC, as long as the country agrees with peace, love and understanding. So yes, please ban Israel as soon as possible, together with any other countries that don't share these three very basic principles, that seemingly is easy for all the other participants to follow.
Being an Associate Country (or Associate State) doesn't guarantee visa-free travel (ask how we know), yet I'm sure that Canadians will get it served on a silver platter.
>>So, easier to sell stuff, easier to buy stuff, free to just travel to/from Canada/EU and work there with no extra paperwork, free to buy and sell service from Canada to EU and vice versa.
>>No Euro, no vote in EU, no ECJ, no payments into each others budget.
This version of EU integration is more popular than EU itself in significant part of EU right now.
Well, the Brexit campaign was manipulated by a state actor (or rather: 'a criminal actor disguised as a state'). None of the alt-right nationalism is in the long-term benefits of the country. This is globalism, the end game. You either team up, thereby reducing your costs, or you get swallowed. Ask Ukraine, Tibet, Hong Kong how it worked out for them not belonging to a bigger team. So divide and conquer is a logical move for the opponent, and it happens to align with alt-right. There is also documented evidence of external influence in these. A medium such as Follow The Money has documented such in various of their articles.
> The whole political course of Ukraine in the last ~20 years is mostly about teaming up with EU and NATO, isn't it?
Not, on the NATO front at least, the part between NATO bending to Russian demands not to extend Membership Action Plans to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 (followed immediately by the Russian invasion of Georgia)—when Ukraine abandoned pursuit of NATO membership—and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, only after which did it resume pursuit of NATO membership.
The resumption is sometimes tied to the Revolution of Dignity preceding the Russian invasion, and even occasionally claimed to be a reason for the invasion, but the decision to abandon the neutrality position was well after and a response to the invasion rather than the other way around.
For one this seems related to EU the umbrella organization, not Europe the continent, while I suppose the European Economic Area might be geographically limited to Europe the continent. Maybe something like the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) might be more applicative here.
It's actually going to raise questions as to why the EU are A-OK with this now when a possible interpretation of associate membership is it's what Cameron was trying to negotiate the UK into when complete inflexibility on the EU side triggered the Brexit referendum.
All depends on what an associate member is of course.
The UK already enjoyed a large amount of concessions as a full member. The rest of the EU was right not to give in. Also, game theoretically it's of course more important to not make leaving (or threatening to leave) the union seem too lucrative. No such problem in negotiating tighter integration with nonmembers (and in retrospect, many of the old WP countries should've joined as something like associate members at first…)
I don’t think Cameron did much serious negotiation on this front. He resigned the evening of the referendum results.
It was a deliberate choice by his successors to pursue a hard Brexit. A softer Brexit was always possible and likely would have been more acceptable to the EU, as it would have had less financial impact and disruption to trade.
I mean, not really, since the UK was trying to renegotiate an existing deal (which they profited from for decades) towards a deal that would favor the UK more than the EU and would trigger an entire blow-back of other member-states wanting to renegotiate on their EU responsibilities without losing the advantages that this deal brought, whereas the deal with Canada is a new deal where the EU gains better trading and less dependence on the US and Canada gains better trading and more security if their next door neighbor falls apart even further.
The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something.
Also, the Brexit referendum was a campaign promise of David Cameron that was going to trigger if his conservative party won the 2015 general election. Sure, the relationship between EU and UK had strained over the years, but trying to pin this on the inflexibility of the EU feels a bit misdirected.
> Also, the Brexit referendum was a campaign promise of David Cameron that was going to trigger if his conservative party won the 2015 general election
That is iff the renegotiations with Brussels failed, which they did.
> The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something.
V. hard to see what Canada gets out of it. All the roadblocks to Canadian trade with the EU today (especially around resources) are internal to Canada and have nothing at all to do with EU status.
> All the roadblocks to Canadian trade with the EU today (especially around resources) are internal to Canada and have nothing at all to do with EU status.
Presumably under the proposed thing Canada would largely adopt EU regulations. This would make trade (particularly for small businesses) _far_ easier. See the UK for how difficult this can become if you're not in alignment; it's survivable for huge companies (though even some of them had trouble; for instance Marks and Spencers' stores in Ireland literally went empty for a while because they were insufficiently prepared), but if you're a small business importing a bunch of components from Europe and making a thing which is largely sold to Europe, there's a _massive_ difference in bureaucratic overhead between being in and out.
Even many Norwegian SMEs don't see direct sales to Europe as worth the overhead, and Norway's in the EEA, as close to the EU as you can get without actually being in it.
>[The Conservatives promised a referendum] iff the renegotiations with Brussels failed, which they did.
No. The Conservative party promised an EU membership referendum by 2017 in its 2015 manifesto. That was not conditional on a failure of renegotiations. Nor, indeed, did David Cameron even concede that the renegotiations had failed, so that can’t possibly have been his stated reason for calling the referendum.
> My policy is to hold a renegotiation and then a referendum. That is what we promised in the manifesto and then to abide by what the British public say.
So you can see that there was never any suggestion that the referendum would be called or not called depending on the outcome of the renegotiations.
Why is the EU obligated to treat every country the same way? Canada presents different economic opportunities and challenges than the UK. Or, if you want to say it was due to politics, who was bashing who?
The explanation is easy: Canada is not on the European continent. The EU can only extend full membership to countries on the continent, so Canada needs a special arrangement. And because there's a whole ocean serving as a reason for this special treatment, it's easy to argue that it won't extend to countries who can become full members.
The UK wanted it the opposite way. They wanted full access to the EU market but forbid the movement of people because they wanted to get rid of the Poles. The EU would never agree to that and rightly so.
Cameron did get what he wanted before the referendum: "After the deal had been approved, Cameron described it as giving the United Kingdom "special status within the European Union" and immediately declared that both he and the UK Government would campaign for a "Remain" vote in the referendum within a "reformed European Union"."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%932016_United_Kingd...
That is a rather fantastical and revisionist version of why the Brexit referendum was called - which had more to do with a misguided attempt to put the crazy wing of the Conservative Party to bed rather than anything to do with the EU, where the UK had the best deal imaginable already.
Nevertheless when put to British voters 50% of them decided that best possible deal still wasn’t in their interests. And that 50% who voted No was more people than even voted in the EU elections (to elect MEPs) before that. So the EU was very much fine with their democratic process seeming like an irrelevance, while at the same time the Brexit vote was actually an example of a democratic process working as it should. One can argue about craziness or otherwise, but there were at least 17 million crazies at the time and if there was a referendum to rejoin the EU would likely be a different 17 million crazies voting No again.
>>> "it's what Cameron was trying to negotiate the UK into when complete inflexibility on the EU side triggered the Brexit referendum."
"Negotiate" ... is that what you call it?
David Cameron (and team) were the most inept bunch of wankers this country has had the misfortune of being represented by in living memory (in terms of medium/long-term real impact).
We had better terms than anyone in the EU and we still fucked it up.
> Cameron was trying to negotiate the UK into when complete inflexibility on the EU side triggered the Brexit referendum.
You are assigning too much responsibility to the EU here and none to the other actors responsible for Brexit. It borders on propaganda, but I do not want to assume ill intent.
And Cameron, didnt he say he would guide UK no matter the result and then resigned when Brexit won?
Brexit was obviously going to happen a good decade before the referendum, the tension was so blatant. This idea people were conned into voting leave is just utter nonsense - they'd been chomping at the bit for the opportunity for years.
Now the UK has managed to ramp up the tension dramatically, but without some easy foreign political bogeyman to blame. It's not going to end well either, but it's not clear exactly what the endgame is. This is why the Greens, Reform and Restore are suddenly things.
Technlogy? That would likely result in a US market crash the likes of which has never been seen before. Look at what percentage of the stock market is the magnificent 7. Now imagine what would happen to that if US tech giants were no longer allowed to sell their products/services in the EU. The market is fragile as it is with the AI bubble going on.
Trade? That cuts both ways, and the US economy and cost-of-living crisis doesn't give them lots of wriggle room.
Products? China will be all to happy to step into whatever market is thus competition-free, not to mention the impact this would have on US businesses.
> To enable free movement of goods and services the EU insists that the goods and services are produced in an identical regulatory environment.
Doesn't seem to be true anymore, at least in every case. See the EU-Mercosur agreement for one recent exception to this, the goods we're now importing from South America don't have the same regulatory environment by far, to many of our local farmers.
A lot of this is about resource access, and that can't be magically conjured. You can have all the industry and business you want to put on paper, but this is a tangible concern for Europe where they require these things from a stable and trusted nation with a similar regulatory and political environment.
This trade matter is likely going to require a new type of agreement that has some special privileges not extended in any other case for both parties.
Depends what they mean by ‘full’, really. I expect the EC would be happy enough to let them opt out of the euro, say. But maybe not the working time directive.
I think free movement of people doesn’t imply Schengen Zone style borders - I thought this was mostly an economic lever that people can move and work in another country by default, not a human right where a country cannot exclude chosen people (known criminals, etc) and track all crossings. I think of it as another country giving me a visa is opt-out for that country, not opt-in.
The CE rules are relatively sane and followed commonly right? At least I see a lot of CE-stamped goods in Australia… so I always assumed that was the case.
All that Schengen does is dismantle border checkpoints. As a German, I can freely move to any EU country for any purpose - transit, tourism and work - no matter if, say, I were a convict or whatever.
There are expulsions and entry bans even under Schengen, but these are incredibly rare things to happen as the freedom of movement is considered to be a cornerstone of EU values.
Not all of the EU is in schengen, but we do have freedom of movement. Ireland for example is not in Schengen and never will be because of our travel arrangements with the UK.
> Also, to be able to sell stuff, you gotta comply with the CE rules one way or another, there is no free card here.
Yes but there's a big difference between "only import electronics that aren't fire hazards" and "you have to pay custom & excise on anything you import".
Australia has managed a 2nd and a 4th from 11 entrants. Our voting participation is quite low though, as the voting windows are usually at awkward AEST times and the main Australian broadcast of the contest is delayed until our primetime.
It has to be like Norway/Switzerland/Iceland or more to get any free movements of goods and services. Level of access goes hand in hand with integration in term of regulation, etc.
"Associate member" actually sounds like TIGHTER integration than Norway/Switzerland/Iceland, which are not members at all. Switzerland is not even in the EEA. It is a very bad term, actually as Canada cannot be an EU member (it isn't in Europe) and if they don't want or can't join the EEA then that leaves a Switzerland-like deal, which is purely bilateral.
It's the law and it should be very strictly enforced because otherwise it'd open the door for the Middle East and North Africa... But I don't think Canada would want to join the EU, it's anti-Trump bluster.
Canada does not want to join the E.U. as a full member and that is not what is being offered.
Canada very much is not “blustering” when it comes to Trump. A big majority of Canadians see sovereignty and less reliance on the US as a massive issue. Canada has embraced China in a way that was unthinkable 5 years ago in a deal intended to hedge against the US. The Canadian Conservative Party lost an election it was thought to have a guaranteed win from and has continued losing seats since then in large part due to their half hearted response to Trump.
I'll go back to my first comment above: What is an "associate member"? We don't know because it's a concept that does not exist but the very name suggests something stronger and tighter than anything that exists with non-members that have very close ties (Norway, Switzerland, Iceland).
Hence I think it is safe to say that this is a lot of bluster, or ar least hyperbole, considering what Canada and the EU might really want and the long and complicated treaty process to define and create an "associate member" status.
Middle eastern or North African countries can’t join because the member states don’t want them to join and they need unanimous agreement. See Turkeys failed bid for example. Even a country with positive general public appeal like Ukraine is very unlikely to join in the next 10 years
Yes, unanimous agreement is required once a country has applied, as part of the process of accepting the application.
However Article 49 of the European Union states: "Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting
them may apply to become a member of the Union".
So Middle Eastern and North African countries (and Canada) cannot apply in the first place.
I think Turkey is in the grey area that allows some wriggle room as it spans both Europe and Asia.
Turkey, only a tiny part of which is geographically in Europe, is a candidate (though talks are suspended in practice until, at least, Erdogan is out of power), and Cyprus is geographically in Asia/Middle East, not Europe. The rules could certainly be loosened further with agreement.
But also, yes, Canada probably does not want to be a full member, at least in the near-term; they want some sort of alignment not amounting to full membership. I wouldn't be totally amazed if we look back on this as the start of the (long-suggested) two speed EU system.
When several EU countries are already struggling with large Indian Subcontinent communities that don't integrate (and dodge taxes and food-processing regs--Indians where I am have their own large underground cash-only food economy among themselves), opening up flow of people from Canada's mobile classes which has seen vast demographic change seems like it would only exacerbate the problem.
Which countries are these? There's a large population of Indian immigrants in Ireland, who seem to be integrating fine and are not notably doing much tax dodging (they would largely work in high-skill PAYE jobs, where tax dodging is virtually impossible).
I am assuming you are somewhere in Europe and given your apparent dislike for Indians, let's look at an alternative narrative. As a Canadian of East Indian origin, I can tell you that if these individuals are Canadian citizens, they are very unlikely to leave Canada for Europe. If they are not Canadian citizens, the point is moot anyway. In fact, I would expect more European citizens of South Asian origin to move to Canada, where English is spoken, integration is generally easier and salaries are far higher. So, breathe easy.
Hey, Celine Dion won Eurovision already. We just need to get Switzerland to retroactively let her win stand for Canada :)
If it gets a free trade and freedom of movement system in place, I don't think anyone is going to object in Canada much. Unless they try to open up fisheries, which would get them a bunch of Maritime (and Quebec?) objections...
Easier to fly to Europe from our privatized airports! Sounds great!
The funny thing is that we got this, instead of tangible and needed deregulation within Canada. Another announcement, instead of actual shovels in the ground and making life better for Canadians.
The main negative of the EU is people can migrate through it to get to your country, like the UK's small boats crisis. Canada, being so far from the EU, doesn't have that unique disadvantage. Which is good news for Canada if this does end up working.
What actually _is_ the deal? Nobody in this thread seems to have any idea what the specifics are, which matters a lot. It sounds like we're still at the "very early talks" stage? Less integration than even Norway (EEA)?
This requires likely an alignment of trade and product standards, so could still be demanding legally to get over the line. But the foundations are similar.
Maybe Canada could just join EFTA, that would be easier.
> Although, no joke, a lot of peoples first reaction is: "They need to compete in Eurovision first. Otherwise they should wait for Australia to join first."
What? First time I hear of this. Honestly, Eurovision doesn't really have anything to do with the EU. We all know the main sponsor is from a non-EU country whose participation is much more controversial than Canada anyway.
> Canada's Bill C-22 Would Force Encryption Backdoors
> Signal, Windscribe, and NordVPN say they'll pull out of Canada before building surveillance infrastructure. The biggest threat to encrypted communications in a Western democracy since Australia's 2018 law.
And yet NordVPN and Signal both continue to work in Australia (I don't know who/what Windscribe are), so all other things aside, I suspect this is a hollow threat.
This is only part of the question though, the other question is is it actually good for the EU to continue growing and becoming more heterogenous indefinitely, which to me isn't at all clear.
You could make a good case that the EU is still trying to deal with issues from the 2004 expansion for example. Doesn't mean it was a bad idea, but it's not cost free
If a company wants to sell in the EU, they should comply with EU rules. The market and the regulations are closely linked, you won't get one without the other.
I think Canada might have an opportunity to help Europe at least reason a bit about regulations.
For the most part I am thankful that the EU regulates things strictly. As long as I am the consumer of what is regulated and not the maker. Because while the regulation is well meaning, it is not always effective or efficient. And sometimes it achieves absolutely no positive results.
And yet, I am generally for regulating a lot of things.
For instance the cookie-popup-horseshit is failed regulation that came about mainly because regulators were squeamish about real solutions that would have required constant judgement calls. Instead of posing an existential risk to companies that run roughshod over our privacy, they created impotent regulation that is a dual failure: it protects exactly nobody and it wastes everyone's time multiple times over.
Companies that do bad things should face existential risks. It is the only mechanism that works. Fines only work for small players. For large players it is surprisingly often a calculation where the numbers dictate you DO bad things because the downside risk is mostly quantifiable and financially acceptable.
Yes, sanctioning companies guilty of egregious violations of privacy would have been noisy, but it would have been the right thing to do. And it would have been cheaper and more effective than what we have today.
A lot of replies confidently explaining ‘what this actually means’ in some detail despite the article saying things like:
> [Canada would be] EU's first "associate member"
> …
> [Von der Leyen] did not give specific details on how any Canadian membership would work, but listed manufacturing, technology, AI, defence, energy, critical minerals and economic security as key areas for cooperation.
> …
> But "associate membership" of the EU does not currently exist and the process, if agreed, could take years.
CETA (free trade) already exists with the EU. What is happening here is mostly symbolism and diplomacy. And maybe it will lead to the last hold out EU member states fully ratifying CETA (French farmers famously difficult).
Many people (including Carney himself) are presenting this as a fundamental and recent pivot.
But the opening moves of this happened a long time ago. CETA was negotiated by Chrystia Freeland and the now-often-maligned Trudeau gov't.
(also Trudeau also had a honeymoon phase for the first two to three years of his term...)
Canada has Coke and Pepsi flavours of gov't. The differences between the two parties comes down to stupid culture wars stuff and perhaps emphasis on which sectors should dominate the economy, but they don't fundamentally differ.
Carney just eviscerated all environmental laws and climate change initiatives -- which were already pathetically weak -- and cons back in my home province of Alberta are still apoplectic about how persecuted they are. It's all team sport theatre. Dangerously close to US style dysfunction.
Translation: I don't care if it was Harper or Trudeau who "initiated" CETA.
I'm afraid you're mistaking our lunatic leader with "us". Understandable, but this step will be wholly unnecessary as soon as December when his power will be checked (largely). I lean right, more libertarian small government type, so you're not hearing this from a blowhard on the American left. His foreign policy, the way he's treated friends has been wanton and immensely damaging, and a whole lot of us want this corrected.
As another of your, ah, problematic presidents once said:
> "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
Like, if the US had just elected ol' minihands once, that would be one thing. But it did it _twice_. Ultimately, even if he's comprehensively put back in his box, there is an issue of long-term trust.
At this point, Pandora's Box has been opened; it has been established that the US president can just act like a crazy dictator and... none of the mechanisms which are supposed to prevent that actually really function. Even if the US elects the most normal, sensible, rule-of-law-focused president imaginable in 2028, Canada will still have to look to 2032. I'm not sure that anything short of constitutional change would really restore trust, and the US is set up such that changing the constitution is virtually impossible.
Eased travel and trade, but not full membership voting rights, etc. So basically, an extensive trade and economics agreement, with options to intensify relationships later on.
This is a sinking ship trying to lash unwitting tenders to it to try to keep it afloat while it rams an iceberg. Canada does not need that kind of trouble.
Just want to chip in: I love you "yanks", not so much your politics and your imperialistic tendencies, but nearly all Americans I met were nothing but kind (coast to coast, left or right).
Every "yank" I know is also pretty great. The problem is a political system that has entrenched an advantage for a party that would otherwise be consistently in the minority, reducing the ability of the center to moderate policy.
Canadians are right to be skeptical that the next presidency will be significantly better than the current one. A serious amount of goodwill has been burned and I think the average view up north is that it's time to build a very solid backup plan.
It doesn't even fix things if the next POTUS is the exact opposite. The world has been shown what we are capable of doing. Any four-year stretch could be governed by a joke hired to "own the libs".
Caligula's horse can't be elected solely because horses don't live past 35.
I was surprised to learn that Canada doesn't even have free trade across their own provenances. A big benefit of the United States is that it's essentially a very large free trade zone across 50 states.
If Canada wanted to facilitate trade, I would imagine they would figure it out internally. So my guess is that this is just giving up some political autonomy for some unknown reason, maybe to stick it to the US?
The biggest trade barriers between Canadian provinces are labor licensing laws. The biggest trade barriers between American states are labor licensing laws.
The second biggest trade barriers between Canada provinces are liquor regulations. The second biggest trade barriers between American states are likely car emission laws.
Not comparable at all. The US is one market unless you have a compelling reason to protect your state market. Canada is 10 separate markets with provincial agreements between them - all protecting themselves. Easiest example is Quebec.
The US is the opt-in system where the States regulate everything not specifically allocated to the federation and Canada is the opt-out system where the federal government regulates everything not specifically allocated to the provinces.
Of course it's more complicated -- the US's inter-state commerce clause has been broadly interpreted by the courts.
The problem is the differences are asymmetric. Canadian labour mobility is a lot more impactful when the pool of skilled labour is just overall smaller.
Doctors can move pretty much freely between 44 American states. Doctors can't do that in Canada, and here we need more specific kinds of doctors in rural populations and there is absolutely no reason to not have a harmonized licensing regime.
We also have non-uniform regulation on stuff like the manufacture of construction goods (for example door sizing) which can cause a big drag in trade. This might be harder to fix but it exists and is not comparable to the US market.
The US also doesn't have free trade following the same criteria, labeling requirements differ by state, licensing regimes are different, the same kind of challenges that exist in Canada
What is a provenance WRT Canada? :-) But it is true, our provinces have trade barriers internally that is an ongoing source of dispute. There has been movement since the USA started falling apart to remove them. The dumbest one was that hay bales had to be re-arranged on the AB/BC border.
We say as Europeans while interacting daily with USA engineers and other people here on HN - a site ran by Silicon Valley investors - while we usually talk about USA-made software. I personally do not hold every American accountable for the actions of their government.
On day-to-day interactions with my coworkers, I had no problem working with Americans.
At the same time, a lot of them voted in favor of foreign policies that I very strongly disagree with.
Both can be true at the same time, and the former doesn't make me forget the latter. Especially when their president continues to voice threats against the sovereignty of my country.
Thanks - you are right and have the much more mature perspective. Many want to further drive a wedge between the US and Europe, presumably they live in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran.
The current regime is due 2028. For most of their history Canada and USA had cordial relations. This looks like a reactionary measure rather than a long term strategic one. Europe is in decline and facing political irrelevance, not the type of partner you want to have particularly if your border neighbor is one of the two current global super powers. It’s yet to see if the UE’s economic reforms will pay off, even of they do, is still decades away, with no cheap energy and having to invest in their own defense. You don’t want to hang out with the losers. Put your emotions aside, be patient with the current US government and get ready for post 2028.
“Also in September 2023, France and Germany proposed a restructuring of the membership of the EU to allow the UK to rejoin as an associate member, rather than a full member. Associate membership would include membership of the European single market but not the EU customs union, in exchange for participation in the European Court of Justice and making contributions to the EU budget.”
I get that the trend is being accelerated with Donald Trump being an aggressive asshole for no reason, but Canadians pretending like they're anything but American is very weird.
There are multiple levels of European integration [1] but here are some guiding principles:
1. To have a say in EU rules generally requires being a full member. To some extent you can negotiate your entry into whatever level you desire but this has to be mutual agreement and can be difficult to change later without essentially threatening to leave;
2. Conditions generally need to be reciprocal. If you want freedom of movement in the EU then you have freedom of movement from other European states. This was a real sticking point in the Brexit negotiations and the EU doesn't play with reciprocal freedoms; and
3. Any sort of free trade with the EU will mean adopting EU regulations to be within the EU customs union. I don't see this flying with Canada because despite current trade hostilities with the US, the US is and will remain the primary trading partner of Canada. Adopting EU regulations might make US trade more difficult;
Also, the US might have legitimate cause to object. If Canada and US have free trade and Canada and the EU has free trade then that's opting the US into EU regulation essentially.
In some ways this is similar to the strained situation invented for Northern Ireland.
Obviously, Canada won't be joining Schengen or the Euro. Canada already has visa-free travel to the EU.
Canada still has a housing crisis and increased migration from the EU is likely a political non-starter even though those things aren't really related and literally nobody is going to tackle the true cause of the housing crisis (just like in every developed country). As an aside, the true cause is hoarding combined with tax advantages and a political goal of raising house prices.
In short, I don't know that this means anything because I don't think anything can substantively change with the Canada-EU relationship.
Von Der Leyen has a stellar track record of successes in both internal and external EU affairs. She is an inexhaustible well of good ideas and great policies. When such suggestion comes from her I am sure it is great idea for both Canada and EU.
Mercosur, sanctions against Russia and Belarus, defence of France after the AUKUS fiasco, an intent to cut down reliance on natural gas, an ethics commission following the Qatari corruption scandal, the European green deal, European defence plans, she's done plenty of good.
She's also done plenty of bad things on the political theatre, but it's not like everything she does is destined to be a failure.
War in Ukraine is still waging, can't comment, war in Iran showed the brilliance of importing LNG, ethics commission will find no wrongdoing, stupid idea, vaporware ...
Maybe this is a naive statement, but it seems like full membership including open borders between Canada and other EU states and adoption of the Euro would also be beneficial to everyone involved.
The UK should continue to be embarrassed and ashamed to leave such an incredible institution, although at this point we can say that they clearly don’t deserve the EU anyway.
Yes but someone will need to step in and adjudicate once everyone in Europe has enough of living in the United States of Germany and there’s another war over it.
Leyen babbles a lot. I have absolutely nothing at all against Canada and EU getting closer, but please don't dance when Leyen whistles - that leads to nothing but uselessness. She should have never been in politics to begin with - the absolutely worst person for the job.
Don't be. Trump is a necessary and welcome wake up call. We Canadians needed Trump's shock of reality.
The truth is that, for more than a century, the main trait of being Canadian was simply not being American and not trusting Americans.
In 1775 George Washington ordered the invasion of southern Quebec and we resisted. After the American revolution we received an huge influx of Loyalists, the Americans that didn't want to be part of the U.S.; we say the American Revolution created 2 countries: yours and ours. In 1812 Americans raised war against us, as a continuation of the Napoleonic wars. Although we were still a British colony, we fought back, invaded Washington DC and set the White House on fire. In 1890, the McKinley Tariffs were meant to subjugate us, the same way Trump wants to do now [1]. They backfired, made us stronger.
But in the 80's the Reagan-Mulroney trade agreement fooled us. We became too reliant, friendly and confident to the Americans. It was a dangerous illusion. The Comanche, Apache and Navajo have learned too late that you can't trust Americans. Luckily for us, Trump reminded us that lesson on time, before it would be too late.
> The Comanche, Apache and Navajo have learned too late that you can't trust Americans
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy probably learned this the strongest. And more even than the Loyalists help build this country. Or I'm more conscious of this as I live in a place where Joseph Brant's (Thayendanegea) name is all over the place.
But they -- and Britain's other indigenous "allies" in the US interior -- also learned the hard way that the British couldn't be trusted either. The Treaty of Ghent ended the war of 1812 but on terms that let the Americans commit genocide against the native populations to the west of them ; which the British were formerly allied with.
And while the Iroquois were granted all extensive lands along the Grand river as reward for helping fight the Americans in 1784 (Haldimand proclamation) -- they subsequently had that chipped away at for generations and it's just a tiny postage stamp of what it used to be.
> Canada's Bill C-22 Would Force Encryption Backdoors
> Signal, Windscribe, and NordVPN say they'll pull out of Canada before building surveillance infrastructure. The biggest threat to encrypted communications in a Western democracy since Australia's 2018 law.
Both of these things can be true (and things we as Canadians have to aggressively oppose) but at the same time, it was the US that pioneered such gems as:
the PATRIOT act, Stellar Wind, PRISM & Section 702 (FAA), Upstream Collection & AT&T Splitter Rooms (Room 641A), Bulk Telephony Metadata (Section 215, the Post-9/11 NYPD Demographics Unit, the Data Broker Loophole (Commercial Surveillance Purchase). Oh god, I could go on all day.
Or did/does things like extraordinary rendition to Guantanamo, or the illegal rendition of Canadian citizen Maher Arar to a Syrian torture facility while he was traveling through the US, or even just taking tourists phones and looking at the anti-Trump memes they've shared and detaining them.
Any "libertarian" American pointing fingers at Europe and Canada as somehow more repressive is living in an ideological echo chamber. The targets are (sometimes) different but every "western democracy" set up oppressive regimes post-9/11 that should outrage anybody.
Both "left" and "right" in the US are living in a delusional world if they think their constitution is worth jack shit as any kind of protection in the 21st century.
It seems every country in the world has such regimes, either publicly or in the background. You can bet no Chinese or Russian system comes without backdoors, plenty of US systems have been revealed to have backdoors, etc.
I disagree with this, but it's still somehow not an aspect uniquely horrible about EU or Canadian policy making, so not sure why this would be relevant here.
There is a strand of US politics which has tried to characterize Canada as uniquely authoritarian ever since the Ottawa protests. And it's been used increasingly as justification for external partisan "interventions"
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 93.6 ms ] threadAnyway, I think you missed this reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement
As of today, with current affairs and the unpredictable element in chief, you may never know how long.
If they changed that they'd perhaps become world powers themselves.
No, that's just the 2010s propaganda fed to you by people who assert that not letting them do whatever they want is "bureaucratic". These very same people are completely fine lobbying legislature for more moat when they benefit from it.
The difference between "middle democracies" or whatever that means and the US is just that politics aren't corrupted enough yet that they can buy whatever they want.
But yes, Americans are told they have the freest speech and the freest markets, and don't seem to question either.
Yeah, an organized and powerful administration is the basis of rule-of-law system. The opposite isn't entrepreneurship, it's a state of widespread corruption where laws are toothless.
It doesn't benefit upstarts who want a fair environment to start a business, it benefits megacorps with their own militia of lawyers to bend the rules, and pockets deep enough to lobby for the removal of rules that can't be bent.
Think of AI copyright infringement. You know why the AI labs are in the USA and China and not in Europe.
Canada is corrupt as hell, just no one cares so it doesn't make international news.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mckinsey-immigration-consul...
[2] https://thewalrus.ca/shadow-government/
[3] https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/08/31/prime-...
So is Europe. It's just not at the point the US reached, yet.
When your examples of Canada being "corrupt as hell" are such chickenshit nonsense, it betrays that you're just a partisan zealot that has literally zero sense of scale or reason.
McKinsey, a massive consulting firm, had a whole $32M in business with the government? Holy shit, basically the deep state! Sounds like the globalist infiltrated the government!
The SNC thing was embarrassing, but it was over its behaviour overseas (Libya, to be precise, where a dictator's family got wined and dined), and the government was concerned about a massive, major Canadian firm being crippled by domestic hand wringing.
When that is what you have to offer up for Canada being "corrupt as hell", in comparison to criminal shitholes like the US (which you think is much better, as you've explained elsewhere), wow. Back to shitty subreddits where your tiny group of laughable farces have your discussions about how dire things are.
I say it with absolute conviction that I desperately want every "Canada is broken" jackal like you to pack up and move South of the border.
That's unfettered capitalism at work—"free" implies no bounds. Multinational corporations have never been more powerful now than at anytime in history.
No bounds for whom?
Your implied premise is that private companies cannot impede others' freedom, which isn't true. In unfettered capitalism, only the largest corporations have the power and money to be free.
It is odious to start a company in the EU. There are many accounts of this on HN itself.
This is false.
> There are many accounts of this on HN itself.
Yes, I saw one just recently where the poster made obviously false statements about starting a company in Germany.
If they were to change some within the citizenry would stand to gain at the expense of others. Inequality would increase.
Seems—for now—middle democracies aren't prepared to pay the high price of social upheaval such a policy would create.
European sentiment is totally out of touch with European reality. They'll post gleefully online about how much better their life is and then go back to their sardine flat where they can't afford to pay for heating, and it never ever occurs to them to reconsider any priors. They'll huff copium on Reddit about how bad American healthcare is, while waiting for years for desperately needed surgeries, paying far more for healthcare by way of taxes than any American does.
Are their ideas out of touch? No, it's reality that's wrong.
This is blatantly false. Americans spend 18% of GDP on healthcare, while most European countries are around 10%.
Your lament of "Oh no China is the best in the world and only getting better!!!" is long long out of date.
In ten years the downvoters will not only agree with this, but have moved on to "and that's a good thing".
If in 10 years the ratio moves from 70/6 to 50/26, the situation will be vastly different.
The options are not black and white
Since Trump is hostile to trade with both parties there's an opportunity to replace lost US trade that's probably not coming back.
Trump has weakened himself and his allies where as mutual trade between Canada and the EU makes both stronger.
Polish export to EU is 74% of its total export and import is about 60% of its total import.
Economically - whatever's good for EU is good for Poland and US barely matters.
I’ve always been told don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and the journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step.
The lesson here is that you can’t rely on the US anymore. Not for military protection, not for defence procurement, and not for trade or supply chain. That legacy has ended entirely by choice of the United States.
The problem has moved beyond monetary trade value and into existential risk.
Better remove the bandaid now then wait until you are screwed.
People now see China as the reliable partner. This will be a multigenerational change.
Being in a situation where 70% of your exports go to one country is arguably pretty unhealthy; that is something that Canada would do well to work towards reducing, even _if_ the US administration wasn't openly hostile.
It is 100% about Trump.
The other democracies can no longer count on the US as a stable ally the way we have in the past (whether that trust was misplaced is a matter of perspective).
Simply put, you did it twice, We can't rely on them not doing it again.
Americans voted for that clown regime twice.
They cannot and should not be trusted anymore.
Yes, after all and more, no future Hitler has yet emerged.
Unless you see these things happening soon, then not really a good comparison.
I don't think even the most hardened bsky communist seriously expects the outgoing administration to be literally taken out and shot.
We can look at Biden. He's not a trump like figure by any stretch. He decided to continue some of Trump's foreign policy.
Removing Trump doesn't remove fundamental issues with the US
This is all a big pain in the back.
All it took was Trump & Republicans
The USA did plenty of offensive stuff before that (like a full campaign labeling the French as cowards for not supporting their baseless war in the middle east), but it took until Trump and his unhinged behaviour for the world to see how bad the situation really was.
The pivot away from Germany / France is starting and will not stop.
All it took was Merkel and sucking up to Russia.
There's no such thing as "friendship" and geopolitics. Everyone should have learned this by now.
To use the Oracle example, USA is like a lawn mower. If you grease the wheels and keep the gas tank full then it will mow your lawn. But if you stick your hands in the blades then it will cut your fingers off.
It also might just cut your fingers off anyway.
Not white enough for the EU. There is a lot of opposition to even Turkey, which is already in customs union, joining and talks are dead specifically because EU countries do not want immigration from Turkey.
Oh yeah, that's gonna be hella popular with the voters.
The other question is what its border control is like at the eastern end.
There are already large numbers of Turks in western Europe, particularly Germany, so presumably some of them would vote for it.
I don't hate the idea
It was known that there was likely to be a Brexit referendum at the time of the Scottish referendum: Cameron had promised one if the Conservatives won the 2015 election.
In a world in which the other great powers revive the Monroe Doctrine or threaten their magnitude smaller neighbors with annexation we're not doing so badly. There is an inherent pettiness, weakness and fake strength in autocracy and force and it's often why I think the EU receives so much disproportionate hate.
Really? Because there's this organisation called CUSMA that nations can voluntarily leave (the US) and some want to stay in (Canada).
It's economy is larger than the EU btw.
If we're doing a trade deal measuring contest, I will just point out that the EU has the world's largest free trade network, including Canada (already), South Korea, most of Latin America, India etc etc.
Let me guess: NATO doesn't count because...
Sorry, the EU does not have any special mythical status that does not apply to other organisations, unless you want to play word games so it's the only one that even qualifies.
The Catholic Church has more members than NATO, too, but it's a completely nonsensical comparison.
The EU doesn't have some mythical status that doesn't apply to any other organization, it just has a very specific status in political science that it's the most successful example of: Supranationalism.
Anyways, why are we doing this silly phallus size competition in the first place? Can't we just accept that the EU is a major player on the world stage and that people look up to it?
The EU feels like an incomplete experiment. Not strong enough to actually be a single market. But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones.
The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
EU already has uniform regulations, what are you talking about? It's also the third largest economy in the world, as uncompetitive as it is.
If going by GDP (which this claim usually does), the EU as a whole beats out China for second place by ~10%. When going by individual countries Germany alone is the third place behind China, though with a large gap between the two.
These sorts of refactorings take time, even more so if done by "committee". The good thing is that explicit interfaces have to be created thereby (hopefully) increasing adaptability and resilience over time.
I agree, but there are huge barriers to taking this step. You need a common identity to create a nation. Americans have one, so do other large nations. The EU does not.
It seems to me the EU is overburdened with trivial regulations (like regulating the maximum power consumption of domestic vacuum cleaners) rather than prioritizing core issues of its single market, manufacturing, trade, etc.
Trouble is small vested interests hold overly powerful sway over EU-wide policy. The example above is a case in point, individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted.
You're correct, annoying regulations are bloating the EU bureaucracy making it lethargic and uncompetitive.
People proclaim this with such confidence, especially in the UK before the Brexit years I must say, and yet there are so many arguments against it.
First, accepting this goes against a core tenet of the single market, since the single market for vacuum cleaners is now split into 27 little markets. We thus need 27 regulatory bodies to each investigate, and then make a political decision, on the maximum power setting of domestic vacuum cleaners. Then, producers in China will have to make (up to) 27 different models of vacuum cleaners. This is certainly not going to be cheaper, completely destroys the famous Brussels effect [0], all for some token amount of "sovereignty".
Nations states can sovereignly decide to delegate this process of rule making to Brussels, and domestic vacuum cleaners are a perfectly mundane "case in point" to showcase the benefits of this process. The EU is far from a perfect union, but throwing these frankly naive arguments around will not help it much.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo. There’s plenty of good ingredients, plenty of challenges too. It can still go either way. Hell, at this rate it might outperform simply because US and China blow up due to domestic problems.
The thing about mojo is that it’s super hard to predict. It might stay where it is and Europe’s share of global GDP might decline to nothing. Or it might rekindle out of nowhere due to some impulse.
Either way, middle democracies are a somewhat threatened species now, and from their individual PoV an imperfect union might be much better than efficiently staying on their own.
While I do appreciate and even support the idea that the immense wealth available on planet earth should be more evenly distributed, and people should mostly be focused on raising families, deepening their philosophy, and perfecting their craft... (some societies in Europe are pretty laid back in terms of hyper-productivity culture)
Regulation is possible without paralyzing industry. Laws about the internet are possible without stifling freedom. Central planning is possible without crashing the economy so bad you end up with a regime change. It all comes down to execution and for the most part, it's been a series of failed experiments.
As much as I want a happy future for Canadians and Europeans, I just don't see the odds being super favourable.
We don’t look either at the successful parts, not at the world where it is wholesale gone. My gut feeling is that EU members are, on the whole, much better off for being in than out. One natural experiment is the UK - opinions differ, but the drastic accumulation of problems coincides with Brexit timings.
I’m all for improving the EU! And for sure there are bad bits. But when your car AC is doing badly, you don’t write off the car. You try to fix the AC…
But also: > The European Union has a nominal GDP of roughly $20 trillion, placing it closely on par with or slightly ahead of China ($19 trillion), but smaller than the United States ($30–$31 trillion)
I don't know about you but the same GDP as China sounds economically successful... or not?
Of course there's plenty of ways around it. In the case of film production, if the script calls for the characters to be in a specific location - then it's now a cultural asset that the government can fund with rebates. The person writing the script is of course aware of this and the incentives available.
So neither of these are good sustainable examples.
EU has such a bad name in these circles. As a EU citizen, I cherish these same regimes.
The only reason the trade is easy in EU (and with it non-EU partners) is these regulations. Countries that choose to stay outside but wanted access to our market (like Norway, Switzerland, etc.) - had to accept the regulations. So I highly doubt you'll get your wish.
So, easier to sell stuff, easier to buy stuff, free to just travel to/from Canada/EU and work there with no extra paperwork, free to buy and sell service from Canada to EU and vice versa.
No Euro, no vote in EU, no ECJ, no payments into each others budget.
Tighter integration than UK, not as tight as Norway/Switzerland/Iceland.
Common defense was already agreed anyhow.
I can tell you this enjoys broad support in the EU public. Although, no joke, a lot of peoples first reaction is: "They need to compete in Eurovision first. Otherwise they should wait for Australia to join first."
> Tighter integration than UK, not as tight as Norway/Switzerland/Iceland.
This will not work as Norway and Switzerland pay. I am unsure about the UK whether they pay or not, but anything else would be unfair to Norway and Switzerland.
> Common defense was already agreed anyhow.
Where and how? Surely not via the EU because the EU has no power over that. See how Austria is part of the EU but militarily neutral.
> I can tell you this enjoys broad support in the EU public. Although, no joke, a lot of peoples first reaction is: "They need to compete in Eurovision first. Otherwise they should wait for Australia to join first."
Canada is much more appreciated than the USA here, but you need to look at all fine details. Right now it seems to me that e. g. Carney, and Leyen, use this more as promo-tour. Nothing against Canada moving closer to the EU, mind you, but this here seems a lot more show-value centered than "show us the details". Because what are the exact details here? I am all in favour of countries cooperating more now that the USA has gone fully rogue, but politicians love show and entertainment.
Eurovision is also stupid. Why is Israel part of it? That makes zero sense, even way aside from what war criminal Netanyahu is doing - it's not a european country. Something is wrong with the word EU. It constantly seeks to expand. So that is now a misnomer.
But either way that's not the scandal. The scandal is that Russia's broadcaster got kicked out for Russia doing bad things (fair enough) but Israel's was kept in despite their government doing even worse things.
For starters, neither Israel nor Azerbaijan threaten Europe with nuklear annihation on a nearly weekly basis.
The other thing more applies to other sports like soccer, most Arab countries (but especially Iran) will not accept having to work with Israel because it would require them to accept Israel as a legitimate country.
Eligibility to compete is not based on country, but my membership to the European Braodcasting Union of which Israel is a member, and Australian SBS is an associate member and was allowed to compete as a special case.
Don't bring Eurovision into it. Learn to lighten up and have some fun instead.
So then why was Russia kicked out?
Easy to say if you haven't experienced the killings
> Where and how?
NATO presumably
Canada gets significantly better deal than any other non-EU country.
To see people like you seeth.
>>No Euro, no vote in EU, no ECJ, no payments into each others budget.
This version of EU integration is more popular than EU itself in significant part of EU right now.
That we'd still have to comply with EU rules if we wanted to trade with them, but we wouldn't have any vote in those rules
The whole political course of Ukraine in the last ~20 years is mostly about teaming up with EU and NATO, isn't it?
Not, on the NATO front at least, the part between NATO bending to Russian demands not to extend Membership Action Plans to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 (followed immediately by the Russian invasion of Georgia)—when Ukraine abandoned pursuit of NATO membership—and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, only after which did it resume pursuit of NATO membership.
The resumption is sometimes tied to the Revolution of Dignity preceding the Russian invasion, and even occasionally claimed to be a reason for the invasion, but the decision to abandon the neutrality position was well after and a response to the invasion rather than the other way around.
> no payments into each others budget.
Not going to happen!
To enable free movement of goods and services the EU insists that the goods and services are produced in an identical regulatory environment.
Even when the regimes are basically identical - eg the UK - then the EU doesn't permit it without budgetary contributions.
All depends on what an associate member is of course.
It was a deliberate choice by his successors to pursue a hard Brexit. A softer Brexit was always possible and likely would have been more acceptable to the EU, as it would have had less financial impact and disruption to trade.
The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something.
Also, the Brexit referendum was a campaign promise of David Cameron that was going to trigger if his conservative party won the 2015 general election. Sure, the relationship between EU and UK had strained over the years, but trying to pin this on the inflexibility of the EU feels a bit misdirected.
That is iff the renegotiations with Brussels failed, which they did.
> The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something.
V. hard to see what Canada gets out of it. All the roadblocks to Canadian trade with the EU today (especially around resources) are internal to Canada and have nothing at all to do with EU status.
Presumably under the proposed thing Canada would largely adopt EU regulations. This would make trade (particularly for small businesses) _far_ easier. See the UK for how difficult this can become if you're not in alignment; it's survivable for huge companies (though even some of them had trouble; for instance Marks and Spencers' stores in Ireland literally went empty for a while because they were insufficiently prepared), but if you're a small business importing a bunch of components from Europe and making a thing which is largely sold to Europe, there's a _massive_ difference in bureaucratic overhead between being in and out.
Even many Norwegian SMEs don't see direct sales to Europe as worth the overhead, and Norway's in the EEA, as close to the EU as you can get without actually being in it.
No. The Conservative party promised an EU membership referendum by 2017 in its 2015 manifesto. That was not conditional on a failure of renegotiations. Nor, indeed, did David Cameron even concede that the renegotiations had failed, so that can’t possibly have been his stated reason for calling the referendum.
You can check the summary of the manifesto at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32302062, or page 30 (printed page number) of the original document at https://www.barnetconservatives.co.uk/sites/www.barnetconser....
Another clear indicator can be found in this article: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/10/david-camer.... Here, Cameron is directly quoted as saying:
> My policy is to hold a renegotiation and then a referendum. That is what we promised in the manifesto and then to abide by what the British public say.
So you can see that there was never any suggestion that the referendum would be called or not called depending on the outcome of the renegotiations.
Both of which Canada is ok with.
"Negotiate" ... is that what you call it?
David Cameron (and team) were the most inept bunch of wankers this country has had the misfortune of being represented by in living memory (in terms of medium/long-term real impact).
We had better terms than anyone in the EU and we still fucked it up.
You are assigning too much responsibility to the EU here and none to the other actors responsible for Brexit. It borders on propaganda, but I do not want to assume ill intent.
And Cameron, didnt he say he would guide UK no matter the result and then resigned when Brexit won?
Now the UK has managed to ramp up the tension dramatically, but without some easy foreign political bogeyman to blame. It's not going to end well either, but it's not clear exactly what the endgame is. This is why the Greens, Reform and Restore are suddenly things.
B) If it did happen, the US would just say “give us the same deal or you get cut off” and Europe would capitulate immediately.
Technlogy? That would likely result in a US market crash the likes of which has never been seen before. Look at what percentage of the stock market is the magnificent 7. Now imagine what would happen to that if US tech giants were no longer allowed to sell their products/services in the EU. The market is fragile as it is with the AI bubble going on.
Trade? That cuts both ways, and the US economy and cost-of-living crisis doesn't give them lots of wriggle room.
Products? China will be all to happy to step into whatever market is thus competition-free, not to mention the impact this would have on US businesses.
Doesn't seem to be true anymore, at least in every case. See the EU-Mercosur agreement for one recent exception to this, the goods we're now importing from South America don't have the same regulatory environment by far, to many of our local farmers.
This trade matter is likely going to require a new type of agreement that has some special privileges not extended in any other case for both parties.
Also, to be able to sell stuff, you gotta comply with the CE rules one way or another, there is no free card here.
About competition in Eurovision: absolutely, would love for them to participate, even if just as guest state :D
LMAO just googled it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_in_the_Eurovision_Song_...
The CE rules are relatively sane and followed commonly right? At least I see a lot of CE-stamped goods in Australia… so I always assumed that was the case.
There are expulsions and entry bans even under Schengen, but these are incredibly rare things to happen as the freedom of movement is considered to be a cornerstone of EU values.
Yes but there's a big difference between "only import electronics that aren't fire hazards" and "you have to pay custom & excise on anything you import".
Doesn't this mean that Canada is, in a certain degree, dependent of UK?
"Associate member" actually sounds like TIGHTER integration than Norway/Switzerland/Iceland, which are not members at all. Switzerland is not even in the EEA. It is a very bad term, actually as Canada cannot be an EU member (it isn't in Europe) and if they don't want or can't join the EEA then that leaves a Switzerland-like deal, which is purely bilateral.
I think the construct of geographical location should not be that big of an issue in these times. Plenty of EU countries have overseas properties.
Canada very much is not “blustering” when it comes to Trump. A big majority of Canadians see sovereignty and less reliance on the US as a massive issue. Canada has embraced China in a way that was unthinkable 5 years ago in a deal intended to hedge against the US. The Canadian Conservative Party lost an election it was thought to have a guaranteed win from and has continued losing seats since then in large part due to their half hearted response to Trump.
Hence I think it is safe to say that this is a lot of bluster, or ar least hyperbole, considering what Canada and the EU might really want and the long and complicated treaty process to define and create an "associate member" status.
However Article 49 of the European Union states: "Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union".
So Middle Eastern and North African countries (and Canada) cannot apply in the first place.
I think Turkey is in the grey area that allows some wriggle room as it spans both Europe and Asia.
But also, yes, Canada probably does not want to be a full member, at least in the near-term; they want some sort of alignment not amounting to full membership. I wouldn't be totally amazed if we look back on this as the start of the (long-suggested) two speed EU system.
A possibility.
https://www.reuters.com/business/australia-on-same-page-cana...
If it gets a free trade and freedom of movement system in place, I don't think anyone is going to object in Canada much. Unless they try to open up fisheries, which would get them a bunch of Maritime (and Quebec?) objections...
Fisheries are obviously not going to happen. They didn't happen with Iceland, they are not going to happen with Canada either.
The funny thing is that we got this, instead of tangible and needed deregulation within Canada. Another announcement, instead of actual shovels in the ground and making life better for Canadians.
Maybe Canada could just join EFTA, that would be easier.
Sounds like it could be a solution for the UK as well, which begs the question: why wasn’t a similar proposal worked out with the uk?
What? First time I hear of this. Honestly, Eurovision doesn't really have anything to do with the EU. We all know the main sponsor is from a non-EU country whose participation is much more controversial than Canada anyway.
> Signal, Windscribe, and NordVPN say they'll pull out of Canada before building surveillance infrastructure. The biggest threat to encrypted communications in a Western democracy since Australia's 2018 law.
https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/canada-bill-c22-lawful-...
You could make a good case that the EU is still trying to deal with issues from the 2004 expansion for example. Doesn't mean it was a bad idea, but it's not cost free
For the most part I am thankful that the EU regulates things strictly. As long as I am the consumer of what is regulated and not the maker. Because while the regulation is well meaning, it is not always effective or efficient. And sometimes it achieves absolutely no positive results.
And yet, I am generally for regulating a lot of things.
For instance the cookie-popup-horseshit is failed regulation that came about mainly because regulators were squeamish about real solutions that would have required constant judgement calls. Instead of posing an existential risk to companies that run roughshod over our privacy, they created impotent regulation that is a dual failure: it protects exactly nobody and it wastes everyone's time multiple times over.
Companies that do bad things should face existential risks. It is the only mechanism that works. Fines only work for small players. For large players it is surprisingly often a calculation where the numbers dictate you DO bad things because the downside risk is mostly quantifiable and financially acceptable.
Yes, sanctioning companies guilty of egregious violations of privacy would have been noisy, but it would have been the right thing to do. And it would have been cheaper and more effective than what we have today.
> [Canada would be] EU's first "associate member"
> …
> [Von der Leyen] did not give specific details on how any Canadian membership would work, but listed manufacturing, technology, AI, defence, energy, critical minerals and economic security as key areas for cooperation.
> …
> But "associate membership" of the EU does not currently exist and the process, if agreed, could take years.
>
Many people (including Carney himself) are presenting this as a fundamental and recent pivot.
But the opening moves of this happened a long time ago. CETA was negotiated by Chrystia Freeland and the now-often-maligned Trudeau gov't.
(also Trudeau also had a honeymoon phase for the first two to three years of his term...)
Carney just eviscerated all environmental laws and climate change initiatives -- which were already pathetically weak -- and cons back in my home province of Alberta are still apoplectic about how persecuted they are. It's all team sport theatre. Dangerously close to US style dysfunction.
Translation: I don't care if it was Harper or Trudeau who "initiated" CETA.
> "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
Like, if the US had just elected ol' minihands once, that would be one thing. But it did it _twice_. Ultimately, even if he's comprehensively put back in his box, there is an issue of long-term trust.
At this point, Pandora's Box has been opened; it has been established that the US president can just act like a crazy dictator and... none of the mechanisms which are supposed to prevent that actually really function. Even if the US elects the most normal, sensible, rule-of-law-focused president imaginable in 2028, Canada will still have to look to 2032. I'm not sure that anything short of constitutional change would really restore trust, and the US is set up such that changing the constitution is virtually impossible.
Eased travel and trade, but not full membership voting rights, etc. So basically, an extensive trade and economics agreement, with options to intensify relationships later on.
Good thing for both sides!
Canadians are right to be skeptical that the next presidency will be significantly better than the current one. A serious amount of goodwill has been burned and I think the average view up north is that it's time to build a very solid backup plan.
Caligula's horse can't be elected solely because horses don't live past 35.
If Canada wanted to facilitate trade, I would imagine they would figure it out internally. So my guess is that this is just giving up some political autonomy for some unknown reason, maybe to stick it to the US?
The second biggest trade barriers between Canada provinces are liquor regulations. The second biggest trade barriers between American states are likely car emission laws.
Fairly comparable, IMO.
I.e. Opt in vs Opt out but more complicated.
Of course it's more complicated -- the US's inter-state commerce clause has been broadly interpreted by the courts.
Doctors can move pretty much freely between 44 American states. Doctors can't do that in Canada, and here we need more specific kinds of doctors in rural populations and there is absolutely no reason to not have a harmonized licensing regime.
We also have non-uniform regulation on stuff like the manufacture of construction goods (for example door sizing) which can cause a big drag in trade. This might be harder to fix but it exists and is not comparable to the US market.
We say as Europeans while interacting daily with USA engineers and other people here on HN - a site ran by Silicon Valley investors - while we usually talk about USA-made software. I personally do not hold every American accountable for the actions of their government.
For what it’s worth, as an American, I agree with them. The USA is proving to be unreliable, if not outright malicious, to our long term allies.
At the same time, a lot of them voted in favor of foreign policies that I very strongly disagree with.
Both can be true at the same time, and the former doesn't make me forget the latter. Especially when their president continues to voice threats against the sovereignty of my country.
Nobody knows; it’s all up for negotiation.
FWIW, a (¿the?) previous time this term was floated, it involved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_re-accession_of_the_...):
“Also in September 2023, France and Germany proposed a restructuring of the membership of the EU to allow the UK to rejoin as an associate member, rather than a full member. Associate membership would include membership of the European single market but not the EU customs union, in exchange for participation in the European Court of Justice and making contributions to the EU budget.”
Salut ! I wouldn't say the Americans are no longer our friends, but trust is definitely gone.
1. To have a say in EU rules generally requires being a full member. To some extent you can negotiate your entry into whatever level you desire but this has to be mutual agreement and can be difficult to change later without essentially threatening to leave;
2. Conditions generally need to be reciprocal. If you want freedom of movement in the EU then you have freedom of movement from other European states. This was a real sticking point in the Brexit negotiations and the EU doesn't play with reciprocal freedoms; and
3. Any sort of free trade with the EU will mean adopting EU regulations to be within the EU customs union. I don't see this flying with Canada because despite current trade hostilities with the US, the US is and will remain the primary trading partner of Canada. Adopting EU regulations might make US trade more difficult;
Also, the US might have legitimate cause to object. If Canada and US have free trade and Canada and the EU has free trade then that's opting the US into EU regulation essentially.
In some ways this is similar to the strained situation invented for Northern Ireland.
Obviously, Canada won't be joining Schengen or the Euro. Canada already has visa-free travel to the EU.
Canada still has a housing crisis and increased migration from the EU is likely a political non-starter even though those things aren't really related and literally nobody is going to tackle the true cause of the housing crisis (just like in every developed country). As an aside, the true cause is hoarding combined with tax advantages and a political goal of raising house prices.
In short, I don't know that this means anything because I don't think anything can substantively change with the Canada-EU relationship.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1qbq43v/european_in...
I guess it's the white version of saying Gringo.
Canada's economy is propped up by Alberta's energy production, which you my loose because they're so disgusted with the liberal politics.
Anyway, good luck with revitalizing the economy by trading with a bloc of countries in economic decline.
She's also done plenty of bad things on the political theatre, but it's not like everything she does is destined to be a failure.
The UK should continue to be embarrassed and ashamed to leave such an incredible institution, although at this point we can say that they clearly don’t deserve the EU anyway.
A description that fits a lot of politicians!
Notably many member states (incl. France) have not fully ratified it. The majority of its benefits are in place but not all.
Which doesn't bode well for the actual on the ground reality of any "associate member status."
I expect it will be mostly symbolic/diplomatic.
Don't be. Trump is a necessary and welcome wake up call. We Canadians needed Trump's shock of reality.
The truth is that, for more than a century, the main trait of being Canadian was simply not being American and not trusting Americans.
In 1775 George Washington ordered the invasion of southern Quebec and we resisted. After the American revolution we received an huge influx of Loyalists, the Americans that didn't want to be part of the U.S.; we say the American Revolution created 2 countries: yours and ours. In 1812 Americans raised war against us, as a continuation of the Napoleonic wars. Although we were still a British colony, we fought back, invaded Washington DC and set the White House on fire. In 1890, the McKinley Tariffs were meant to subjugate us, the same way Trump wants to do now [1]. They backfired, made us stronger.
But in the 80's the Reagan-Mulroney trade agreement fooled us. We became too reliant, friendly and confident to the Americans. It was a dangerous illusion. The Comanche, Apache and Navajo have learned too late that you can't trust Americans. Luckily for us, Trump reminded us that lesson on time, before it would be too late.
[1] https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-u-s-tariff-act-of...
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy probably learned this the strongest. And more even than the Loyalists help build this country. Or I'm more conscious of this as I live in a place where Joseph Brant's (Thayendanegea) name is all over the place.
But they -- and Britain's other indigenous "allies" in the US interior -- also learned the hard way that the British couldn't be trusted either. The Treaty of Ghent ended the war of 1812 but on terms that let the Americans commit genocide against the native populations to the west of them ; which the British were formerly allied with.
And while the Iroquois were granted all extensive lands along the Grand river as reward for helping fight the Americans in 1784 (Haldimand proclamation) -- they subsequently had that chipped away at for generations and it's just a tiny postage stamp of what it used to be.
No good guys.
> Signal, Windscribe, and NordVPN say they'll pull out of Canada before building surveillance infrastructure. The biggest threat to encrypted communications in a Western democracy since Australia's 2018 law.
https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/canada-bill-c22-lawful-...
+
> European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy, Framing Mass Surveillance as “Lawful Access”
> The EU’s ProtectEU strategy quietly sketches the blueprint for a backdoor.
https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-protecteu-strategy-encryption-b...
the PATRIOT act, Stellar Wind, PRISM & Section 702 (FAA), Upstream Collection & AT&T Splitter Rooms (Room 641A), Bulk Telephony Metadata (Section 215, the Post-9/11 NYPD Demographics Unit, the Data Broker Loophole (Commercial Surveillance Purchase). Oh god, I could go on all day.
Or did/does things like extraordinary rendition to Guantanamo, or the illegal rendition of Canadian citizen Maher Arar to a Syrian torture facility while he was traveling through the US, or even just taking tourists phones and looking at the anti-Trump memes they've shared and detaining them.
Any "libertarian" American pointing fingers at Europe and Canada as somehow more repressive is living in an ideological echo chamber. The targets are (sometimes) different but every "western democracy" set up oppressive regimes post-9/11 that should outrage anybody.
Both "left" and "right" in the US are living in a delusional world if they think their constitution is worth jack shit as any kind of protection in the 21st century.
I disagree with this, but it's still somehow not an aspect uniquely horrible about EU or Canadian policy making, so not sure why this would be relevant here.
There is a strand of US politics which has tried to characterize Canada as uniquely authoritarian ever since the Ottawa protests. And it's been used increasingly as justification for external partisan "interventions"