Canada Is Already a Member of the EU – Sort Of
No one wants to change the EU treaties to redefine the geographical requirement for membership. Brussels has found a faster way to bring Canada closer to Europe.
In July, Donald Trump signed a proclamation imposing additional tariffs of 50 per cent on certain Canadian dairy products. He said Canada was treating the European Union better than the United States when it came to cheese. He considers this unfair. Unintentionally, he also captured something important about the direction of Canadian foreign policy.
The idea of Canada joining the EU has been discussed with unusual seriousness in recent months. France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, raised it in March. Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, even told Mark Carney personally that he should consider it. In an April YouGov poll, 55 per cent of respondents in Germany and 51 per cent in Spain said Canada should join the EU. In Poland, the figure was 41 per cent. A Nanos poll found that 57 per cent of Canadians supported the idea. Carney’s position, however, has been clear: closer ties with the EU, yes; membership for now, no.
The obstacle is not political. It is legal. Article 49 of the EU Treaty says that only European states can become members of the EU. Changing that rule would require the unanimous agreement of all 27 member states, followed by ratification in each of them. Only then could Canada apply under the rules of Article 49 itself: a unanimous decision by the Council, the consent of the European Parliament and ratification of the accession treaty by all member states.
A new member of Canada’s size, and the prospect of an enlarged single market, may sound attractive. But few member states would embark on the laborious process of changing the treaties without knowing what the outcome would be. The polls therefore measure enthusiasm for an idea that is unlikely to become a political question any time soon.
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Canada has already moved further in two other areas.
In February 2026, it signed the SAFE agreement at the Munich Security Conference. SAFE is an EU financing instrument worth €150 billion for joint defence procurement. Canada became the first non-European country whose companies can participate in certain joint procurement projects financed through SAFE.
Then, in May, Mark Carney attended the eighth summit of the European Political Community (EPC) in Yerevan. He was the first head of government from a non-European country to attend an EPC summit. There he described Canada as “the most European of non-European countries” – a line made for quotation and, at the same time, carefully non-committal. The Canadian government does not describe either SAFE or participation in the EPC as a step towards EU membership. Nor does it need to: neither involves a vote on membership.
The EPC emerged in 2022 from a problem the normal accession process could not solve. How could countries be brought closer to Europe without making them wait years for membership?
Ukraine had applied to join the EU just days after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The application could not offer any quick route to accession. Macron therefore proposed a different format, one that could bring Kyiv, the United Kingdom, which had already left the EU, and the Balkan accession candidates closer to Europe without opening their accession procedures.
The first meeting took place in Prague in October 2022. The EU-27, Ukraine and the UK sat together at the table; 44 European countries took part altogether. The new platform had neither a legal basis in the EU treaties nor a fixed membership.
In September 2022, Ursula von der Leyen had described the initiative as a way of engaging European countries beyond the normal accession process. The institutional framework was left open.
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That open-ended design has now acquired a new use.
When Macron presented the EPC in 2022, it was explicitly framed around the European continent. The forum was meant to bring together Ukraine’s ambitions and Britain’s estrangement within a deliberately undefined European space.
Now Canada, a G7 country from outside Europe, is sitting at the table for the first time. No vote was needed to extend the forum to non-European countries. All it took was an invitation and an acceptance.
That may sound like a small institutional detail. It is not. The EU does not have to change its treaties to bring Canada closer politically. It does not have to decide whether Canada is “European enough” for membership. It can simply use a political space whose boundaries were never fully defined.
There is still a hard limit. In 2024, 75.9 per cent of Canada’s goods exports went to the United States; in 2025, the figure was 71.7 per cent. Geography is what it is. No gesture towards Brussels will change Canada’s existing supply chains in the short term.
Something else is changing, though. It is a question of trust. With whom does Ottawa want to sit at the table when decisions are made about defence procurement and military security? Canada remains economically and militarily closely tied to the United States. At the same time, it is beginning to build a second strategic relationship in Europe.
The two directions are not necessarily contradictory. Canada can remain dependent on the United States for trade while seeking greater strategic room in Europe. Brussels, for its part, can widen its political reach without spending the political capital required to change the treaties. Ottawa can demonstrate that it is diversifying its strategic relationships without pretending that its economy could quickly detach itself from the United States.
THE VERDICT
No one is going to change Article 49. Persuading 27 governments to redefine the term “European state” and secure the necessary national ratifications is not a battle Brussels will take on unless a crisis forces it to. Unlike in the case of Ukraine, there are no tanks on Canada’s borders.
The more interesting decision is being made elsewhere: in a political forum with no legal basis for EU membership, created four years ago in response to a different crisis. Its open structure now permits something that was never explicitly ruled out when the forum was created.
Canada is unlikely to join the European Union any time soon. But it has begun to take a seat at a European table where proximity is possible without membership.
That may be the more realistic form of European enlargement in the 21st century: not enlarging the EU, but enlarging the political space that Europe can encompass.
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