571–580 of 876 posts
As a Canadian, this feels like hopping on board a sinking ship. EU and Canada have both severely underperformed for the last 10 years. I hope encouraging more trade can help.
i have to think that many people would consider the current situation with the usa is already a sinking (sunk?) ship.
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I mean, not really, since the UK was trying to renegotiate an existing deal (which they profited from for decades) towards a deal that would favor the UK more than the EU and would trigger an entire blow-back of other member-states wanting to renegotiate on their EU responsibilities without losing the advantages that this deal brought, whereas the deal with Canada is a new deal where the EU gains better trading and l…
> Also, the Brexit referendum was a campaign promise of David Cameron that was going to trigger if his conservative party won the 2015 general election That is iff the renegotiations with Brussels failed, which they did. > The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something. V. hard to see what Canada gets out of it. All the roadblocks to Canadian trade with th…
Presumably under the proposed thing Canada would largely adopt EU regulations. This would make trade (particularly for small businesses) _far_ easier. See the UK for how difficult this can become if you're not in alignment; it's survivable for huge companies (though even some of them had trouble; for instance Marks and Spencers' stores in Ireland literally went empty for a while because they were insufficiently prepared), but if you're a small business importing a bunch of components from Europe and making a thing which is largely sold to Europe, there's a _massive_ difference in bureaucratic overhead between being in and out.
Even many Norwegian SMEs don't see direct sales to Europe as worth the overhead, and Norway's in the EEA, as close to the EU as you can get without actually being in it.
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more than a half dozen Canadians have already competed in Eurovision, including one winner (Céline Dion). has Australia ever won?
Australia has managed a 2nd and a 4th from 11 entrants. Our voting participation is quite low though, as the voting windows are usually at awkward AEST times and the main Australian broadcast of the contest is delayed until our primetime.
Aye, please no. We don’t want to be the 28th EU state any more than we want to be the 51st EU state.
No idea what this actually means, if it means easier trade, I'm all for anything that reduces our dependency on the yanks, as long as we don't need to be involved in their regulatory or legal regimes. The Americans are no longer our friends, Salut, mes amis Européens. :)
Nobody knows; it’s all up for negotiation.
FWIW, a (¿the?) previous time this term was floated, it involved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_re-accession_of_the_...):
“Also in September 2023, France and Germany proposed a restructuring of the membership of the EU to allow the UK to rejoin as an associate member, rather than a full member. Associate membership would include membership of the European single market but not the EU customs union, in exchange for participation in the European Court of Justice and making contributions to the EU budget.”
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This potential deal for Canada comes with compromises which would obviously be unacceptable to the UK (e.g. no full voting rights).
Does anyone actually know publicly what is and isn't the deal for associate membership? At least here (in Canada) I'm not seeing any concrete details.
No idea what this actually means, if it means easier trade, I'm all for anything that reduces our dependency on the yanks, as long as we don't need to be involved in their regulatory or legal regimes. The Americans are no longer our friends, Salut, mes amis Européens. :)
Carney was asking for freedom of movement of goods, people and services, but without full monetary and legislative integration. So, easier to sell stuff, easier to buy stuff, free to just travel to/from Canada/EU and work there with no extra paperwork, free to buy and sell service from Canada to EU and vice versa. No Euro, no vote in EU, no ECJ, no payments into each others budget. Tighter integration than UK, not as…
Maybe Canada could just join EFTA, that would be easier.
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> Carney was asking for freedom of movement of goods, people and services, but without full monetary and legislative integration. > no payments into each others budget. Not going to happen! To enable free movement of goods and services the EU insists that the goods and services are produced in an identical regulatory environment. Even when the regimes are basically identical - eg the UK - then the EU doesn't permit i…
> To enable free movement of goods and services the EU insists that the goods and services are produced in an identical regulatory environment. Doesn't seem to be true anymore, at least in every case. See the EU-Mercosur agreement for one recent exception to this, the goods we're now importing from South America don't have the same regulatory environment by far, to many of our local farmers.
I’m not sure this is a good thing for Canada. The EU feels like an incomplete experiment. Not strong enough to actually be a single market. But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones. The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
But also: > The European Union has a nominal GDP of roughly $20 trillion, placing it closely on par with or slightly ahead of China ($19 trillion), but smaller than the United States ($30–$31 trillion)
I don't know about you but the same GDP as China sounds economically successful... or not?