Von der Leyen proposed making Canada the first associate member of the European Union, with Carney in the chamber. Eighteen months ago Trump warned both sides not to work together.
In March 2025, Donald Trump posted a warning on Truth Social.
“If the European Union works with Canada in order to do economic harm to the USA, large scale Tariffs, far larger than currently planned, will be placed on them both.”
It was a threat with a condition attached. Do not work together.
On Wednesday morning in Strasbourg, the President of the European Commission delivered her State of the European Union address with the Canadian prime minister sitting in the chamber, and said this:
“In this new world, we must urgently re-imagine our partnerships and build global coalitions for our resilience and democracies. I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada being the first associate member of the European Union.”
There is no such thing
That sentence is doing something unusual, and it is worth being precise about what.
The European Union has no associate members. The category does not exist. Full membership involves a lengthy accession process and comes with rights, including access to the single market, alongside financial, fiscal and legal obligations. There is no tier below it.
A proposal earlier this year to offer a “membership light” to Ukraine drew backlash from several member states, which gives some sense of how the bloc has historically treated the idea of intermediate status.
Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland all have special arrangements covering matters like the free movement of goods and people. None of them is a member of anything. Iceland rejected reopening full membership talks two weeks ago.
So what von der Leyen proposed is not admission to an existing club. It is an offer to build a new room onto it, and to give Canada the keys first.
Why Canada and not Britain
Bloomberg has reported that EU officials see potential for a closer relationship with Canada than with the United Kingdom, and their stated reasoning is worth reading twice.
Canada, in their assessment, has successfully implemented a sovereignty agenda on economic and defence matters, and that campaign could inform the bloc’s own push to cut foreign dependencies. Brussels wants to learn from it.
And Canada carries none of the Brexit baggage London does.
There is a concrete measure of that ranking already. In February, Canada became the first and only non-European country admitted to SAFE, the EU’s €150 billion defence procurement programme. Britain has not been admitted. The EU charges SAFE partners a fee calculated on expected economic spinoffs, and set a drastically lower fee for Canada than for the United Kingdom.
Bloomberg’s analysis notes the offer also sketches a route for Britain to rebuild its ties with the bloc, with Canada now ahead of London in defining what the status would actually mean.
A country that spent a decade negotiating its way out is watching a country on the other side of the Atlantic being offered a way further in.
What is on the other side of the door
Twenty-seven countries. Roughly 450 million people. A nominal economy of around $21 trillion, the second-largest bloc on earth.
It is also already Canada’s second-largest trading partner after the United States, and that relationship has been growing steadily for nine years without attracting much attention.
CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, has been provisionally in force since September 2017. Between 2016 and 2025, bilateral trade in goods grew by more than 76 per cent and trade in services by around 90 per cent. Combined, goods and services trade grew over 81 per cent.
Canadian merchandise exports to the EU rose from $22.9 billion in 2016 to $34.6 billion in 2024, an increase of 51.1 per cent. Two-way merchandise trade reached approximately C$118 billion.
The sectoral detail shows what Europe actually wants from Canada. Since CETA came into force, European imports of Canadian base metals are up 143 per cent. Minerals up 131 per cent. Energy up 70 per cent. Fertiliser, which is largely Saskatchewan potash, up 225 per cent.
The flow the other way is substantial too. EU goods exports to Canada increased 26 per cent, supporting roughly 700,000 European jobs, 70,000 more than before the agreement. Forty-four per cent more European small and medium enterprises export to Canada now than did beforehand.
And the investment positions are close to balanced, which is rare in a relationship this size. European foreign direct investment in Canada stood at €244.7 billion in 2024. Canadian FDI in the EU-27 stood at €230 billion.
What changed in 2025
The trend predates the tariffs. What the tariffs did was accelerate it sharply and change who was paying attention.
Canadian exports to the European Union rose 23.4 per cent in 2025.
Over the same year, Canadian exports to the United States fell 5.3 per cent to $564.6 billion, the first decline in bilateral trade since 2016 outside the pandemic.
The categories that fell going south were precisely the tariffed ones. Motor vehicles and parts down 5.9 per cent. Metals and minerals, largely aluminum, down 8 per cent. Forestry and building materials down.
The categories that rose going east were the ones nobody taxed. France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain were the largest destinations for those gains.
Bruce Dunlop, Export Development Canada’s regional vice-president for Europe, described what that looked like from inside the system. EDC has been flooded with calls from companies looking for help entering new markets, and Canadian companies have realised that diversifying export markets is no longer a nice-to-have.
By July 2026, the American share of Canadian goods exports had fallen to 66.35 per cent, down from 72.64 per cent a year earlier, and the lowest share since the early 1980s. Non-American markets took a record $25.6 billion in that single month, a third of everything Canada sold abroad.
The parts that are not trade
This is the half that makes the associate membership proposal more than rhetoric, because most of it is already built.
Defence. Canada signed a Security and Defence Partnership with the EU in June 2025 and joined SAFE in February 2026. The first procurement under it is signed: Marconi Technologies of Montreal is building made-in-Canada ORION tactical radios for the Polish Cyber Command, drawing on roughly 100 Canadian suppliers, with deliveries running through to 2030.
Space. Canada has been the European Space Agency’s only non-European cooperating state since 1979, and signed a classified information agreement with it in April.
Research. Canada joined Horizon Europe, a €93 billion programme, in 2024, on the same funding terms as member states.
Energy. Two German utilities have signed twenty-year LNG supply agreements with the Ksi Lisims project on the northern British Columbia coast. SEFE took one million tonnes a year in May. Uniper signed for two million tonnes a year in July, for delivery to Germany, the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Institutions. The European Parliament announced on Monday that it will open an antenna office in Ottawa. It will be the tenth anywhere and the third in North America, after New York and Washington.
Politics. In May, Carney became the first non-European leader to take part in the European Political Community Summit, in Armenia. On Wednesday he became the first head of government to attend a State of the European Union address. On Thursday he addresses the European Parliament itself.
Von der Leyen also raised manufacturing, technology, defence and energy in her speech, and named the Arctic as a flagship joint project.
What this is not
Three qualifications, and they are substantial.
It is not membership, and Ottawa said so before the offer was made. After the Wall Street Journal first reported the associate member idea on Saturday, a senior Canadian official told CBC that the label was one of several considered, that Canada did not propose it, and that the government is “not trying to give up its independence for access.” Carney’s own phrase is a “unique alliance.”
That correction now sits oddly, given that the President of the Commission proposed the exact term three days later. But the substance of Ottawa’s position stands: Canada is not applying to join anything.
Nobody knows what it would mean. Bloomberg Economics put the question plainly: how the proposed associate membership would differ, and what it would entail in practice, remains to be seen. Negotiations would likely take years.
And the existing agreement is not finished. Canada’s immediate priority, according to people familiar with the discussions, is completing CETA ratification. That agreement was negotiated a decade ago and has been provisionally applied for nine years, and ten EU member states still have not approved it: Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Slovenia.
The EU also signed a trade agreement with the CPTPP in 2016 that ten member states have yet to ratify, including France and Italy.
Outstanding disagreements between Ottawa and Brussels include the EU’s carbon border pricing on imported goods, its deforestation rules and its pesticides regulations. None of those are small, and all of them hit Canadian exporters directly.
Geneviève Tuts, the EU’s ambassador to Canada, made the point herself earlier this month: as always in the Canada-EU relationship, it is easier to come up with big pronouncements of new initiatives than to actually follow through on them.
The distance travelled
Strip the label out and measure the eighteen months.
In March 2025 an American president warned two allies against cooperating, with a specific threat of tariffs against both.
By September 2026, one of them is inside the other’s defence procurement programme while the United Kingdom is not. Their parliaments are opening offices in each other’s capitals. Their trade has grown 23 per cent in a year while trade with the threatening party has fallen. And the President of the European Commission has offered, publicly, from the floor of the European Parliament, to create a status that has never existed in the bloc’s history and give it to Canada first.
Nothing has been signed. The category still has no definition, and the agreement that already exists is still waiting on ten ratifications.
But the conversation is happening in public now, which is itself the change.
Sources
• EU Proposes Canada Become the Bloc’s First ‘Associate Member’, Bloomberg
• Carney says Canada planning to discuss ‘unique alliance’ with EU, but not membership, CBC News
• EU-Canada trade: facts and figures, Council of the European Union
• Factsheet: EU-Canada trade agreement (CETA), European Commission
• European Parliament to open Ottawa office as Carney seeks ‘unique alliance’ with EU, CBC News