Canada’s new EU association holds lessons for the UK

Joël Reland reflects on what it would mean in practice for Canada to become an associate member of the EU, as well as the lessons for the UK in thinking about its own future EU relationship.

At first sight, Ursula von der Leyen’s announcement that she is “opening the door for Canada to being the first associate member of the European Union” seems like a geopolitical earthquake.

Faced with the diminishing reliability of the US a trade and security partner, Canada is transplanting its political centre of gravity from North America to Europe, while the notoriously inflexible EU suddenly appears open to ‘concentric circles’ of membership which have for decades been discussed but never acted upon.

And within the UK, it has immediately been picked up on, both as evidence of the kind of closer EU relationship it could have got were it not so fixated on a hard Brexit, and as a new potential path back towards the bloc.

Yet, for now, the reality remains more prosaic. We simply do not know what associate membership means exactly. Von der Leyen’s ambition to ‘to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible’ is deliciously vague: it implies some limit on the extent of possible cooperation, but does not tell us where that limit lies.

Von der Leyen envisions replacing the existing EU-Canada Trade Agreement (CETA) with an ‘Alliance for the Future to create a common prosperity and economic security space’. Areas of focus will include AI, tech, quantum, defence industry, critical minerals, batteries and the Arctic.

But the nature of that cooperation – and the balance of Canada’s rights, obligations and institutional integration – remains undefined. Will Canada de facto join the EU single market in some or all of those areas, signing up to EU rules in exchange for frictionless trade and integrated supply chains, and some chance to influence EU policy formation? Or will it amount to a looser partnership based on coordinating policy approaches (e.g. on AI safety) and conducting joint initiatives (e.g. on critical minerals procurement)?

Not even the EU seems to know the answer, as illustrated by two Financial Times headlines from Wednesday morning. One stated Ursula von der Leyen backs Canada’s ‘associate membership’ bid while the other announced EU rebuffs Mark Carney’s ‘unique alliance’ with Canada.

The latter piece highlighted that many member states are opposed to Canada receiving enhanced access to the single market – and that ten countries are yet to even ratify CETA (agreed in 2017) due to concerns about the proliferation of Canadian agricultural goods within the EU market.

This tells us that, while the EU is waking up, as Fabian Zuleeg puts it, to ‘a very different geopolitical context’ that needs ‘ambitious mechanisms for bringing like-minded democracies together’, some old habits die hard – namely the sanctity of the single market.

Any deep Canadian integration into the EU market would take some very heavy work to negotiate a defined set of treaty-bound rights and obligations, and so it seems more likely that – at least in the short term – cooperation will focus on more vaguely-constructed alliances for ‘prosperity’ and ‘security’.

This offers some salutary lessons for the UK in thinking about its own future EU relationship.

First, Canada’s model of associate membership could set some important precedents for the UK. After all, CETA is the EU trade deal which most closely resembles the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. In principle, the new models of cooperation open to Canada, with its level of economic and political integration into the EU, are also up for grabs for the UK.

Second, that model of membership is not likely to create a shortcut back into the single market. At least to begin with, the focus seems likely to be on looser cooperation and initiatives rather than a structured set of rights and obligations à la Norway or Switzerland.

Third, this may well appeal to the Burnham government. As I have argued previously, Burnham seems less interested than Starmer in greater legal alignment with the EU single market, and more interested in the kinds of softer-touch economic security cooperation which may well form the bedrock of the new EU-Canada association.

But fourth, and finally, none of this means UK associate membership is now there for the taking. While the UK might resemble Canada legally, it does not do so politically. Canada carries a lot less baggage than the UK. It did not initiate a dramatic divorce a decade ago, before starting to plead for special access to the single market from outside, while Mark Carney is the poster boy of the emerging ‘middle powers’ movement. Burnham would not have been afforded the same ovation that Carney received in Brussels this week.

And then there is the economics. It is easier to open your market up to more distant economies where trade flows are simpler to monitor and with which you do not directly compete so often. The UK exports five times more in goods to the EU than Canada and is a direct competitor for investment in advanced tech and AI. Canada also has more to offer than the UK in terms of critical minerals supplies and access to the Arctic.

We may come to look back on von der Leyen’s address today as a major tectonic shift in the history of the EU and its approach to third countries. But, for the UK to harness that shift to its advantage, it is going to have to do a lot of work to both think about what UK ‘associate membership’ could look like, and to convince the EU that it is is an idea worth bringing to the table.

By Joël Reland, Senior Researcher, UK in a Changing Europe.