Here's what would happen if Canada joined the European Union
(nationalpost.com)
from sirico@feddit.uk to world@lemmy.world on 13 Feb 2025 13:52
https://feddit.uk/post/24123942
from sirico@feddit.uk to world@lemmy.world on 13 Feb 2025 13:52
https://feddit.uk/post/24123942
The idea of Canada joining the EU has got renewed attention after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened the country with high tariffs
#world
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Is this something that can happen? Like, realistically?
Have you read the article?
TL;DR: I wouldn’t bet on it
A conservative US owned newspaper may have some bias.
I see you haven’t read the article either, because otherwise you’d know that it doesn’t even answer the question directly, but instead goes to great lengths theorizing about every possible outcome, no matter how unlikely it is.
The TL;DR was my own opinion, but if you actually make it through this piece, I’m fairly sure you’ll agree.
If you've been paying attention over the last 2 weeks, literally anything can happen at any time. We live in the age of miracles and horrors.
No
To join the European Union the country must be located in Europe. I don’t think Canada will fill up this criteria.
French Guyana would like a word! Maybe we should just join an already existing European country.
Declare war on, say, France, immediately surrender and become a part of the EU.
Saint Pierre and Miquelon is part of the EU and 19km off the coast of Canada.
Move around some tectonic plates and they’ll be here in no time. (Canadians, you might want to get under a sturdy table for this one.)
It’s totally a technicality but we share a land border with Denmark via Greenland. It’s literally just a rock cut in half in the middle of the Arctic but it counts! (Hans Island)
You’ve just identified that Canada needs Greenland to not separate from Denmark, XOR we’ve lost our opportunity!
: p
Apparently it’s super easy to change the maps. If the Gulf of Mexico can be renamed, we can rename the top half of North America to West Europe.
Things like that seem to take years. Meanwhile in any sane world you’d expect US to return to sanity in four years
That already happened four years ago. Since then there has been an insurrection, women has lost rights and a former President was convicted of fraud and was indicted for many more crimes. The American people voted that criminal into power despite knowing all of that. The US got a taste of sanity and decided they didn’t like that and chose batshit insanity.
rather, the male-supremacists & the passive-white-supremacists voted against Harris, handing the victory to Trump.
The Dems living-in-Hopium, Biden hanging-on-too-long, gutting Harris’s opportunity, etc, didn’t help any, but the root on-the-ground-truth, is that no boomers, nor any machos, were voting for any nonwhite woman president, & that swung the votes FAR harder than the left-press was willing to believe.
G-D itself sees, its law ( what a Soul/Continuum sows, that-specific-Soul/Continuum reaps, no matter what, still is Universal LAW, though, so … this world chose to “blow its brains out” through its anti-accountability/anti-responsibility addiction, & that is going to be playing-out through the rest of this century, until it’s all done ) sees/enforces objectively, so no-matter-what-believers-pretend, objectivity’s getting enforced.
Objectivity is the single “religion” that all ideologies/prejudices/“religions” prohibit from being valid.
Who’s bigger: Universe or collective-human-ignorance??
Natural Selection’s going to display the truth…
Universe moves-on, & if we won’t grow-up, then we haven’t any place left in Universe.
Show me ANY faction who holds that truth to be their center?
Just as a herd of herdbeasts who stampede off a cliff don’t get Universe’s “undoing” that, so they can have a special extra-chance … we don’t either.
Countless worlds, strewn through coundless universes-of-this-kind, in an endless-stream…
Our narcissism is the root-problem: “God revolves around us: God is going to glorify us, God exempted us ( only this-faction! ) from having to grow-up! We only have to be making-believing!”
is humankind’s most-normal answer.
Ever tried arguing with a junkie who’s nearly-dead, about saving their life instead of taking more “junk”?
Humankind’s behaving like that junkie…
Sometimes you just have to let-go, witness, & move-on…
_ /\ _
I think you may have internalized some of the “male-supremacist” rhetoric yourself.
In your wall of text you’re showing a tendency to blame everything on Harris, while you seemingly consider Trump the default choice. Why is that? Why did Harris have to earn your vote while Trump didn’t?
Anybody who believes that Trump will tolerate any 2028-election to toss him out from power … is foolish.
Sorry, but it’s true.
The 2024-election was the FINAL chance the Dems had, & the fluffed themselves in their Hopium, & when it failed, they make-believe that they’re somehow going to be “allowed” to take the country back, later??
Idiocy.
It’s too late.
Construct survival in the actual remaining-context, & then US Civil War Part2 ( which should begin around 2028, -/+ 1y ) will be more-survivable.
Remain within Hopium, & … getting butchered in the coming tsunami-of-violence in North America becomes starkly more-likely.
I’d prefer people be realists, & survive…
Kaizen,
_ /\ _
Well, we'd have to redraw a bunch of maps, so at least it'd one up the dumb Gulf of Mexico distraction.
This seems pretty silly. There are tons of intermediary states Canada could reach without the weird torturing of geography. As the linked piece acknowledges way at the bottom, incidentally.
Imagine if the United States of America had a state that wasn’t part of America. It would be completely crazy! How could it ever make sense?
I mean, picture it: some place, say somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, maybe some independent Polynesian country, just gets made into a state. We wouldn’t be the United States of America anymore!
;-)
It's not just an issue with location. Canadians tend to think they're a lot more... culturally and politically European than they are.
And, again, there are lots of other alternatives before having to incorporate a whole-ass North American country with a landmass twice as big as the entire EU and located ten time zones away into a political and economic union designed to let trucks move things around easily.
The European Union is just a name, a label, I don’t think it would too much of a drama to change the name for something more inclusive, even if we do not change the name, who cares anyway? There are already some overseas territories in South America that technically are part of the EU like someone else pointed.
Agreed.
The idea of Vancouver being in the EU is crazy since it’s halfway around the world.
Although there is French Polynesia and other overseas territories that are part of the EU so I guess it’s not that weird.
I don't see this. Greenland is right next to it so it would just be a westward extension. Australia would be wierd but canada fits right in.
Why would we? The european Union already has existing territory in Latein america, so a north American Country joining aint ruled Out.
*technically, thanks to France, we already have a Union, where the sun never sets. If it we’re Not for the fact, that those other territories are Not recognized as being an integral territory by France , therefore Not being within EU jurisdiction. I guess, If a certain orange would try to coerce France into selling those territories, this opinion of france would change fast 😉
Is there anything in EU regulations that mandates technical standards that would be difficult to replace on a Canada-wide scale, such as 220V/50Hz mains electricity, RF spectrum, TV broadcasting formats and such? How much of a mess would it make to split these into “EU West” and “EU East”, and to balance that with there being a notional single market (“what do you mean the TV I bought in Toronto won’t work in Prague?”)
Aviation, Shipping, Telecom, there’s loads of regulations in the EU…
it isn’t the existence of regulations in the EU that annoys me, as standards, when done right, massively-reduce the “tax” of needless-waste, & needless-harm, …
… rather, it is the standards being decided by things other than globally-elegant effectiveness & globally-elegant efficiency.
Politics has NO proper place in government, yet humankind has handed the world to be outright-RULED by the coalition between political-machiavellianism-of-parties & moneyarchy, using their friend legalism for leverage against Justice ( the fight between legalism & moral-law is millenia-old ), & now physical-force/bullets has sided with the extremists of all sides, to “help” the world resolve to their victory, too…
Sooo many dimensions of this stuff going-on, now…
Anti-strategy, all of that.
No matter: The Great Filter should finish doing its thing by the end of this century, & if anybody is left alive, then they will have grown-up, completely, as a population.
if, though…
… sigh …
_ /\ _
Canada and Mexico should form the American Union and immediately pincer the United States, economically and literally.
Is it still a pincer is it’s A-B-A-B? Don’t forget Alaska.
No, that’s scissors
They should call the new deal the MexiCana or something. Good for all 3 languages.
Yes, English, Spanish, and whatever the Quebec speak.
<img alt="" src="https://i.redd.it/sl9hy7p83eu81.jpg">
Canada and mexico should form a union that’s called Super America. And america isn’t part of it.
Canada is the number 9 economy in the world and Mexico is number 15. This would be a significant body. They could add in Cuba and REALLY piss off the US.
shouldnt eu then be called atlantic union or something
They should annex Mexico too and call it the North American - European Union. The NAEU.
Could you imagine the trading asset Mexico would mean for the European Union? Plus, cracking down on drug trafficking across the Atlantic would be easier.
Maybe like North Atlantic Treaty
OrganizationunionNah - Canada can Naxit since we have an extensive land border with Denmark. And nearly every Canadian could make the grueling cross Atlantic swim to France.
Hmm. I’m not actually sure that’s a problem. Even if we say we want to, the first steps are doing things like aligning regulations and setting up free movement, as this article goes into.
But yeah, even if we make EU Canada work it’s a long way off.
Yeah I didn’t get that part either. If we say we want to be part of the EU and in the end we only improve trade with the EU why is that worse then saying we only want to improve trade relations and only improve trade relations? Don’t get why this guys would be “dismayed” unless he doesn’t really want more trade with the EU.
Transatlantic Union go!
Canada… Northwest Europe.
This should totally happen. I struggle to think of anything that would be made worse by adopting European laws and customs.
We grant you the rank of EU member, but you are not in Europe.
Edit: For those of you taking this seriously, it’s just a play on a stupid star wars meme
We can pass a law saying Canada is part of Europe and Google, Apple, and Microsoft will change their maps.
People float the idea of Australia joining the EU every so often too, but much the same we’d be a second class country basically handing money over to Germany and France for the sake of it.
Yeah, that’s absolutely not how this works.
Eh, continents are entirely a socially-constructed category. I mean, how can Mexican America and South America be one continent when there’s no land route between them, yet Europe and Asia can be two continents? The Americas are on different techtonic plates, which similarly is enough to earn India the designation of subcontinent. And where’s the cut-off between big island and continent? Bigger than Greenland, and smaller than Australia is all we can say.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that with just a quick redefinition of the continents, which already don’t make sense, Canada can be in Europe.
Doesn’t matter. The requirement is to be “a European country”, not “a country in Europe”. What “European” really means has been left deliberately ambiguous.
There is precedent (Cyprus, as well as Turkey previously wanting to join).
France and many EU counties have territory all around the globe. So technically EU is everywhere .
Right, but neither Cyprus, Turkey or Canada have territory in Europe.
What do you mean? We have a land border with Denmark.
If that’s not good enough, maybe Sweden would be willing to part with one of their 267,570 islands. Or at least half of one… if we took the inside half, then Sweden wouldn’t have to worry about losing any of the EEZ.
Neither is Greenland.
I would laugh myself to death.
National Post is a conservative newspaper owned by Americans.
Yup. Which is why this only makes me want to Canada to be an EU member even more.