Canada and EU launch Alliance for the Future, opening door to like-minded nations

Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled the partnership on Friday at the conclusion of a two-day summit in Montreal, calling it a “protective canopy under which our citizens can thrive.” Carney said societies had been “shaken by new storms,” including the climate emergency, the “erosion of democratic norms,” and “the weaponization of trade.”

The summit, set against the backdrop of a trade war between Canada and the United States, saw Canada agree to contribute to a €90bn support loan for Ukraine. Leaders said future discussions would lead to a more integrated market worth tens of billions of dollars, reduced trade and travel restrictions, and new educational opportunities.

Carney pointed to a planned merger between Canadian AI company Cohere Inc and Germany’s Aleph Alpha GmbH as a step toward lessening reliance on American AI giants. Canada’s federal government has announced a stake in Cohere worth up to C$1.6bn. “We are not waiting for the future of AI to be decided somewhere else by those we don’t know, or by whom we don’t trust,” Carney said on Thursday. Brussels and Ottawa also announced an agreement that would bring Canada into Europe’s supercomputing network, giving Canadians access to European machines to train AI models.

Von der Leyen said that “when trade becomes a tool of economic pressure, it’s the families that pay the price,” noting that previously trusted suppliers of energy, critical minerals or semiconductors “are increasingly turned into instruments of pressure.” Carney suggested the alliance could find ways to build certainty around supply chains and “withstand shocks, together.”

The leaders again raised the prospect of Canada becoming an associate member of the EU, a designation Von der Leyen described as uncharted territory. “We have the ambition, trust, and creativity to shape it together,” she said, adding that the partnership is not against anyone else but for common strength. They said a clearer scope of the role would come at a 2027 summit. Some EU members had worked behind the scenes to remove the phrase from a draft of the summit statement, but Von der Leyen and Carney both used it at the summit.

European Council President Antonio Costa said Canada was “by far the most European of the non-European countries” and that the two sides would pursue “the most closer, the most deepest, the most stronger association ever between European Union and a non-European country.”

The summit caused friction in Quebec, where the separatist Parti Québécois was recently elected to a minority government. Premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon skipped the event after Ottawa refused to let him speak publicly at it. He wrote on social media that an invitation to sit at the head table was the federal government asking Quebec “to get back in line, with the vassalization and invisibilization of Quebec which that implies.”