Carney courts EU leaders as Trump’s trade war pushes Canada toward Europe
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has hosted European Union leaders as US President Donald Trump’s trade war strains Canada’s ties with its southern neighbour, though the idea of Canada joining Europe’s ranks draws resistance.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called Canada « the most European of non-European countries », a remark that underlines a shift in Ottawa’s outlook as President Donald Trump’s trade war reshapes North American commerce. Carney has hosted European Union leaders in Canada, positioning the country closer to the bloc at a time when relations with Washington are under severe strain.
The push toward Europe comes as Trump’s tariffs and rhetoric have unsettled one of the world’s most integrated trading relationships. Canada, long tied to the United States through economic, security and cultural links, has been forced to look for alternative partners and reassurance elsewhere. Carney’s outreach to Brussels reflects that search for diversification, and the presence of EU leaders on Canadian soil signals that Europe is willing to engage with Ottawa on its own terms.
The framing of Canada as European in outlook has not been universally welcomed. Carney’s description has prompted debate over whether such language risks being read as a bid for closer institutional ties or even formal membership in the European project. The notion that Canada could be drawn into a European framework faces resistance, reflecting the practical and political barriers that would stand in the way of any deeper arrangement, including the distance between the two sides and the different institutions that govern them.
The episode sits within a wider pattern in which European governments and institutions are weighing how to respond to an unpredictable Washington. Trade disputes have pushed capitals from Ottawa to Brussels to test new partnerships, even as the limits of such realignments remain clear. For Carney, the central challenge is to build practical cooperation with Europe without signalling a rupture with the United States, Canada’s largest trading partner and the country with which its economy is most deeply intertwined.
The question of who belongs inside the European sphere is also being argued in the Balkans. In a commentary published by the Guardian, the writer Srđjan Cvijić argues that some EU leaders courted the authoritarian rule of Aleksandar Vučić, and that Europe must now offer a reborn democracy in Serbia a credible future within the union. Cvijić recalls that as polling stations closed across Serbia on a Sunday evening, riot police were deploying around the presidency in Belgrade, and that many feared massive electoral fraud, a refusal to recognise defeat or outright violence. After nearly 15 years of Vučić’s increasingly authoritarian rule, he writes, a peaceful transfer of power seemed implausible.
Cvijić, who co-founded an annual conference on the security and foreign policy challenges shaping the western Balkans and sits on the international advisory committee of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, notes that such civil society work would be uncontroversial in most countries seeking European Union membership. Under Vučić’s regime, he says, it was anything but. The contrast with Canada’s case is stark: one country is being courted as a partner of Europe while another, seeking membership, has seen its civic work treated with suspicion, and both cases show how questions of values, political reliability and institutional belonging are being weighed across the European sphere.
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