A Change of Masters Is Not Freedom

Why Canada's turn to Europe is not the escape from dependence it appears to be — and on what condition it could become one.

I. The Scene

This week, in Strasbourg, before the European Parliament, Mark Carney is coming to make the case for a "unique alliance" between Canada and the European Union. Days earlier, an American newspaper had floated the idea that Ottawa was exploring "associate member" status; the Prime Minister denied it at once — Canada is not seeking to join the Union, but to forge with it a tie of a new kind, still to be defined. Around that deliberately vague word gather concrete promises: to live, work and study in Europe without a visa; investment "at the core"; and the access, already secured, to the EU's SAFE defence program, where Canada is the first non-European partner. On September 20 he meets Macron at Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon; in late October he hosts the Union in Montreal.

The commentary settled the matter at once: Canada is breaking free. Weary of a neighbour turned hostile, it is turning at last toward Europe, loosening the grip, diversifying. We can breathe.

Allow me a moment's pause. In the first issue, I wrote that the Canada–U.S. debate asks the wrong question — that it asks "which side?" where it ought to ask "which posture?" Here it is again, in another disguise. For "turning toward Europe" is emancipation only if we do not lean on Europe the way we leaned on Washington. And that, no one is checking.

II. What Is Real

Let us first grant the move its share of truth, without stinting. To widen one's options is genuinely to reduce one's vulnerability — a country with a single market, a single supplier of security, a single interlocutor, is a country that can be held. To multiply your supports is to make yourself harder to grip. By that measure, the turn has substance: SAFE opens the joint defence markets; mobility, critical minerals, energy, the promise of doubling exports away from the United States are so many doors that did not exist before. To diversify as one hedges — that is what my first issue defended, and on that count the turn moves in the right direction. This must be said as plainly as what follows.

III. What It Is Made to Say That Is False

For between "hedging" and "substituting" lies a whole world, and it is here that the move is made to say more than it bears.

Europe does not replace the United States as the guarantor of Canadian security. Geography does not move; NORAD does not replicate; the nuclear umbrella, continental integration, the sheer scale of American power have no equivalent that a "unique alliance" might supply. Whoever sells the European turn as a replacement is selling magical thinking.

And Europe, besides, is a slow and divided partner. The trade treaty that already binds Canada to the Union took more than a decade to negotiate, and several member states have still not ratified it. In Brussels, this very day, many still prefer to humour Washington and wait to see what America's midterm elections will bring. Europe, too, is hedging — and hedging, in part, against us. To stake the country on an alliance still without contours, with a partner that hesitates, while the trade war itself is real and present, is not a strategy: it is a gamble dressed up as deliverance.

IV. The Layer No One Names

There remains the question that neither the enthusiasts nor the skeptics ask, and on which everything turns.

To change protectors is not to cease having one. Whether we prop the country's security and prosperity against Washington or against Brussels, we prop it against something still — we remain what the first issue called a client. The European turn liberates on one condition only: that it serve to build Canadian capacity, not to dispense with it. To seek European financing, access to defence markets, mobility, can feed a strength of one's own — or postpone it once more, offering the comfort of a new shelter where what is needed is the effort of autonomy.

For autonomy has a price, and it is the price no one names. One example, drawn from defence, is enough to make it tangible: when the Swedish fighter and the American F-35 were compared on technical criteria alone, the American won across the board. To diversify one's arsenal is therefore not free — it sometimes means accepting, knowingly, a little less capability for a little more independence. That is the trade-off both camps conjure away: the pivot believes it is enough to want Europe; the alliance believes it is enough to stay loyal. Neither says what autonomy costs, nor asks whether Canada is prepared to pay it.

V. The Decision

The real question, then, is not "should we turn toward Europe?" It is: does this turn make Canada more capable — or merely better hedged in its dependence? To widen one's options is a means; it is not the end. The end is the capacity to act: no longer to subcontract the conditions of one's own safety, to be able to say no because one has the means to say it.

It is a decision of posture, not of destination. And it is a decision that a carefully maintained vagueness allows one to duck: so long as the "unique alliance" stays without contours, it promises each what he wishes to see in it — emancipation to some, prudence to others — while obliging no one to decide. The mushy middle I denounced in the first issue has found its foreign-policy costume: a grand gesture that pleases everyone and commits to nothing.

And yet capacity cannot be decreed. A nation consents to the long, thankless price of autonomy only if it holds to something deeper than a calculation — a certain idea of itself, of its legitimacy, of what it has the right to become. That conviction I do not develop here: it deserves an issue of its own, and it will have one. But let it be named now, for without it nothing holds — no country pays the price of its freedom unless it first believes it has the right to be free.

To turn toward Europe, yes — but to lean on it, or to grow by it? Until the question is put, Canada will have done no more than shift the horizon of its dependence. And a change of masters, as we have always known, is not freedom.