Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, is greeted by President of France Emmanuel Macron as he arrives at the Palais de l'Elysee in Paris on Mar. 17.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Aaron Burnett is a German-Canadian geopolitics and security analyst based at Berlin’s Democratic Strategy Initiative.
The spectre of a deeper trade relationship between Canada and Europe keeps U.S. President Donald Trump up at night – if his latest social-media rant threatening higher tariffs on both is any clue.
And that means, all the more, that Canada must seek closer ties to Europe. Mr. Trump is a man who defers to strength and bullies the weak. If a Canada-Europe team-up strikes such a raw nerve, then that means it’s the right move.
But we need more than the photo-opportunity grip-and-grins that were the stuff of Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s visit to Europe this month. If Canada wants deeper relations with the continent, it needs to heed Europe’s repeated pleas over the years.
Canada must put forth a serious plan to provide the continent what it truly needs from us: natural resources. And Ottawa must summon the will for serious, potentially unpopular, reforms to energy and environmental policy.
“Canada has almost all the raw materials we need,” then-European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager told a German newspaper in 2022, arguing that Canada was key to allowing the continent to shift away from its economic dependence on authoritarian states. That includes replacing Russian gas with Canadian liquefied natural gas or Chinese critical minerals with Canadian alternatives.
“As Germany is moving away from Russian energy at warp speed, Canada is our partner of choice,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said a few months later. “We hope that Canadian LNG will play a major role in this.”
Former prime minister Justin Trudeau may have argued there was “no business case” for greenlighting pipelines for shipping LNG, but that didn’t stop leaders and ambassadors from Ukraine, Poland, Greece and Latvia – to name only a few – from stating their support, if only Canada could send it.
Canada’s own critical minerals strategy lists the country having 31 critical minerals and rare earths. We are in the Top 5 sources worldwide for nine of them. Canada has 38 per cent of the world’s potash, with authoritarian states such as Russia, China and Belarus having the only other significant stocks globally.
Yet, as with natural gas, Canadian critical minerals remain heavily dependent on American purchasers, which buy more than $37-billion of these resources from us each year. The entire European Union, by comparison, is buying less than $4-billion from Canada annually.
Exporting natural resources across the Atlantic will make both Canada and Europe more resilient against economic coercion, whether from Mr. Trump’s tariffs or Russian and Chinese blackmail. In countries such as Germany, the alternative to natural gas is increasing coal use, nullifying climate arguments. Given today’s geopolitical upheavals and low economic growth, exporting Canadian resources to Europe should be a cross-party no-brainer.
Yet the current election campaign suggests that unlocking the potential of Canadian natural resources remains hostage to shortsighted, self-harming politics instead of championed as the national interest it is.
For example, Quebec’s vow to oppose any pipeline passing through the province, necessary for exporting to Europe, will leave both Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin assured that “elbows up” is an empty phrase.
And while Mr. Carney rhetorically supports an East-West or Arctic pipeline, it’s incompatible with his pledge to maintain the oil and gas emissions cap. The Liberal Leader simply cannot have it both ways.
Then there is the issue of our onerous regulatory environment: European companies can be incentivized to invest in Canadian resources. The European Investment Bank recently doubled its investment in critical mineral projects. But right now, it can take 12 to 15 years for a critical mineral mine to come online in Canada, deterring investment. Fixing this would require the Impact Assessment Act – better known as Bill C-69 or the “no more pipelines bill” – to be seriously reformed or repealed altogether.
Political support, also in Canada’s diplomacy, will be key. Canadian diplomats based in Europe must aggressively promote the oil, natural gas and critical minerals the continent desperately needs – and is asking Canada for – to derisk European supply chains from authoritarian regimes. A future prime minister will need to put Canada’s natural resources at the centre of future trips to Europe.
Like it or not, natural resources are crucial to a deeper Canada-EU trade relationship that really would keep Mr. Trump up at night, as well as make Russian and Chinese coercion much more difficult.