Canada made the Economist to start 2025. Unfortunately, it was an editorial calling on Canada to join the European Union. Two things should be clear: Europe is lovely, and Canada joining the EU is a terrible idea.
Europe boasts delicious food. The coffee is excellent, as are its gorgeous cities with their lavish opera houses and elegant metro systems.
Europeans generally dress with more class and style, and the lack of hard borders within the Schengen Area makes travel on their efficient, modern trains more of a convenience than a chore.
Yet Europe is also subject to one of the most bloated, self-defeating quagmires of regulation and taxation known to humankind. Brussels, the political capital of the EU, regulates for the sake of it, and Europeans suffer because of it.
Take artificial intelligence, for example. North America and Asia are charging ahead with this new field of technology that may become the most innovative and groundbreaking economic development since the smartphone.
Alberta is looking to host an AI infrastructure network worth $100 billion, potentially powered by nuclear energy, while Microsoft and other tech giants in California are fully integrating AI into their ecosystems and products.
The EU, however, has opted to regulate the AI industry into stagnation. Private investment in AI within the EU fell by 44 per cent between 2022 and 2023, and the EU has done little to stop the bleeding. While the San Francisco-based OpenAI was ploughing ahead with new models for ChatGPT and X was releasing Grok, the EU passed an onerous AI regulation bill that will likely hamper European startups.
This is just one example of how the EU’s indifference to innovation and markets is holding back its younger citizens, who suffer from stagnant wages and high unemployment in the bloc’s low-growth economy.
Canada is already stifled enough by regulations, particularly in our energy sector, and EU membership would likely kneecap it even further.
Beyond pure economic problems, Canadian membership in the EU would open the door to more mass migration. Does anyone seriously expect that the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers concentrated in cities like Berlin, Milan and Paris would not race across the Atlantic to reach the doorstep of the United States?
This would also bring the risk of increased terrorism. Deadly terrorism is an ongoing problem in EU member states like France, Germany and Greece. The perpetrators exploit the Schengen Area’s open borders to bomb airports, drive through Christmas markets and go on stabbing rampages.
Canada is already enduring a low-level terror wave of targeted attacks against the Jewish community, perpetrated by bloodthirsty antisemites using the war in Gaza as a pretext, and that hardly needs to be worsened. EU membership would also open the possibility of importing the pickpockets who plague cities like Rome and Athens, leaving the Atlantic Ocean as the only protection against added petty thievery.
None of Europe’s best aspects would make the jump across the Atlantic unless we incentivize better architectural standards and import better coffee beans. If Canada wants anything from the EU that can be more easily attained, it is the disaffected skilled youth and workers from less well-off member states, who, despite Canada’s economic difficulties, could potentially be enticed by higher salaries.
There is no good reason why Canada should not strive to attract the EU’s surplus skilled workers, given that Brussels does little to make their lives easier. It would be a vast improvement over the unskilled labour wave that we’ve witnessed in recent years.
We should certainly keep expanding our trade and cultural ties with the EU. Despite Europeans’ bewildering fetish for regulatory expansion and centralization, they remain our democratic friends, and we must not shun them. Yet Canada can accomplish this without joining the EU.
If Canada were to join any international organization in the future, it should be CANZUK, a proposed EU-style alliance between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. While it is little more than a good idea at the moment, it promises free trade with familial countries, eased migration between Brisbane’s beaches and Whistler’s ski slopes, and foreign policy co-ordination.
With the exception of the United Kingdom, all the proposed member states are Pacific-facing and share many similar domestic and geopolitical challenges. The Anglosphere’s shared spirit of ordered liberty is far more compatible with Canada than the languid, centralized bureaucracy of the EU.
However, before joining any international organization, Canada must first strive to be a strong country that can stand on its own two feet. We need a government that can expand the natural resource sector — one of the few sectors where Canada punches above its weight — strengthen our military and fix our immigration system. Membership in the EU would hamper all of these goals.
A strong, independent Canada is far better than a weakened Canada subordinating itself to a vast bureaucracy administered on another continent.
National Post