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The story
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that talks aimed at strengthening economic and security partnership with the EU — the world’s second-largest economic bloc — would begin this fall. On Lemmy’s European community, the news was welcomed, and someone half-jokingly suggested that Canada might as well just join the EU outright, sparking a debate over the pros and cons of EU federalization. The thread eventually veered off into a tangent about whether Canadian cities could ever break free from car-dependent infrastructure.
Canadian PM Mark Carney: “Starting this fall, we will begin full-scale talks to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership with the EU, the world’s second-largest economic bloc.”
Source: streamable.com / original clip here
What people said
Seems like at least some Canadians are on board (link to related post). Honestly, I'm surprised how positive the reaction was. That said, I still think Canada joining would be an obstacle to the EU ever becoming a single federal state.
I don't think the EU itself is even ready to become a federation yet. Personally, though, I'd like to see it happen.
You say "Canada joining would be an obstacle to the EU becoming a single federal state," but is that even the EU's end goal in the first place?
Nah, there's no point talking to someone you can't trust. Look at the negotiations with Putin right before the invasion of Ukraine — he promised he "wouldn't invade" and then did exactly that. Total waste of time and energy. I think the EU right now is getting what it wants by keeping its head down. If Trump is that easy to manage, might as well use it to your advantage.
Just change the urban areas then, genius.
Our country's population density is only 5% of Europe's. I'd love to make infrastructure more pedestrian-friendly, but it's just not realistic for maybe half the country. Give it another 200 years and maybe things will change.
Might be surprising, but that actually makes it easier to lay rail lines, not harder.
Nobody's saying build a subway in the Arctic Circle. Everyone lives in cities. Toronto's population density is 4,400 people per square km, which isn't that far off from Stockholm's 5,300. Don't fall for car-culture propaganda — this is doable if there's the will.
I think he's turned out to be the best thing for plenty of countries outside the US too…
Weird as it sounds, same goes for Putin. He's sped up the shift to green tech and triggered a massive military buildup to counter Russian imperialism.
That's total nonsense. Just think about it for five seconds. You think Canadians are evenly spread out across the whole country? No — most of them live in urban areas. The laws heavily favor car infrastructure and are blatantly stacked against pedestrians. Improvement is absolutely possible, and anyone saying "can't be done, density's too low" is either a car-industry lobbyist or just parroting one.
You'd want studded tires for riding on frozen roads. But it's not like you have to bike every single day — the fact that it's a viable option at all is great in itself.
Doesn't Europe have cold places too?
Oulu in Finland is snowed in for most of the year and people still bike around like it's nothing. It really comes down to infrastructure.
Also (at least for now) it gets brutally cold here! I've wiped out more than once trying to bike on icy roads.
We love hockey over here too.
For a federalist like me, yeah. What the EU should ultimately be is something for EU citizens to debate and decide among themselves, but personally I support a federalist approach and think I can make a solid case for it.
It's just not ready yet, that's all.
Even so, you'd need to build and maintain rail lines running not just tens but hundreds of kilometers between major cities, which is insanely expensive. And there's a smaller passenger base and tax base to support it.
(video link) That's because you're wet. Finnish kids are tougher, so that's not an issue for them.
In my experience, riding on icy roads with studded tires actually feels more comfortable and grippier than riding over wet fallen leaves in autumn. It's surprising how much of a difference studded tires make, and you get used to it faster than you'd expect.
Actually, not really. Thanks to the Atlantic currents, it's known for being relatively mild, if anything.
Background and Key Points
Canada and the EU already have a deep economic relationship on paper: the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) has been provisionally applied since 2017, eliminating most tariffs between the two. What Carney is proposing goes further, into a “security and economic partnership” — likely modeled on the EU’s post-Brexit deals with countries like Japan or South Korea, or possibly something closer to the informal defense-industrial cooperation frameworks the EU has floated with non-member democracies. The subtext, which posters picked up on immediately, is Trump-era tariff pressure pushing Ottawa to diversify away from reliance on the US market.
The thread’s real disagreement wasn’t over whether closer ties are good — nearly everyone agreed they are — but over what “joining the EU” would even mean for the bloc’s own trajectory. One camp (>>25, >>26) treated EU federalization as an implicit long-term goal that a geographically detached, non-European member would complicate; another (>>32, >>29) pushed back that federalization isn’t even a settled EU objective yet, so the premise doesn’t hold.
What none of the posters mentioned is that Canadian EU membership isn’t just practically remote, it’s legally impossible under the treaties as written: Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union restricts membership to “any European State.” Canada could join the European Economic Area or negotiate CETA-plus arrangements, but formal accession would require rewriting the EU’s foundational treaty language, not just winning a vote. Readers unfamiliar with EU structure may take the “might as well join” framing more literally than the thread intended — it was always a jokey hypothetical, not a live policy option.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and summaries of the 5ch (Lemmy c/europe) thread “Canada’s PM Carney: "This fall we will begin intense discussions with the European Union, the world’s second-largest economy, to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership".”
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