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This week, Mark Carney hosted the EU-Canada Summit in Montreal with Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa. The two sides announced what they’re calling an “Alliance for the Future.” The European Investment Bank gets a framework to invest in Canadian critical minerals, Canada joins the EU’s supercomputing body, negotiations wrapped on digital trade and competition agreements, and Canada will take part in the EU’s €90 billion loan to Ukraine. Von der Leyen said the EU and Canada are sort of the nucleus of a new international order, and she credited that idea to Carney.
So what is this alliance actually for? Neither Canada nor the EU has mass manufacturing right now, so it’s not going to be trade in physical products. Europe doesn’t produce anywhere near enough energy, and even if they wanted Canada’s, over 90% of Canadian fossil fuels go down into the States. Look at what’s actually being agreed on, digital trade and competition, and knowing the EU and knowing Canada, that’s really just tax and regulation strategies on American companies. It’s less of an economic agreement and more of an administrative one.
Canada spends so much time villainizing Trump and the US, even with longstanding deep roots there and 70% of its goods traded down there. Trump’s going to be gone in a couple of years no matter what. Canada is effectively choosing ideological alignment over economic geography and history, and confusing access to markets with surrendering policy independence.
The ideological alignment is a proxy for something deeper. If you look at how power plays out politically, there’s three levels: the one, the few, and the many. The one is the executive, the few is the managerial class, and the many is the people. In Canada and the EU, almost all power resides within the few. In the EU it’s Brussels, and in Canada it’s the Laurentian elite. The people who find their way into the executive office are part of that class, and they use that office to serve it.
What’s happening in Poland, with Trump in America, with Bolsonaro versus Lula in Brazil, and with Bukele in El Salvador is the same phenomenon. Nationally minded leaders want to get into the executive and govern their countries, and they’re fighting a managerial class that extends across all these nations. In Poland, the EU-aligned prime minister wanted to stack the constitutional court with EU-friendly judges. The president refused to sign off. So while the president was in Senegal, the prime minister and the police let those judges into the court to take their oath anyway. It looks like a coup.
Also discussed during our most recent episode of The Blendr Report was how the Canadian economy didn’t grow in August, the second month in a row. The Bank of Canada raised rates for the first time in three years, from 2.25% to 2.5%. The labour market has shed 110,000 jobs in two months, and the budget lands November 5th with a projected $63 billion deficit. The Bank is raising rates to quell inflation while Parliament runs deficits that cause inflation. Canadians pay the cost and don’t even get the benefit.
Then there’s two elections going in opposite directions. In BC, David Eby called a snap election more than two years early, and the Conservatives won their first election since 1928. Meanwhile, Toronto re-elected Olivia Chow after roughly 20% in property tax increases. People are voting ideologically, not on what’s actually happening.
Listen to The Blendr Report EP177 on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
