Canada Is Acting Increasingly Like the EU's 28th Member State | Hacker News Reader

Canada Is Acting Increasingly Like the EU's 28th Member State

bloomberg.com

20 pointsvrganj18 comments

People speculate about EU membership while completely forgetting that an individual countries can join individual treaties that effectively form the EU as is.

I am betting the EU will extend the access to EEA to Canada, AU. NZ and possibly Korea and Japan. In all these cases, freedom of movement of people and goods would suffice and is much easier sell to citizens of all countries involved.

Although it's still hard to imagine Canada would align their standards to the EU instead of NA.

I think all of this is premature while Brexit hasn't been reversed. It would be an odd day when several Commonwealth countries have European free movement and the UK doesn't.

Brexit won't be reversed, as much as I hate it. Best can be done is EEA membership ad well.

While I think it's not coming any time soon*, Canada's current economic alignment with the US makes them sufficiently far from being a sensible EU candidate that the UK rejoining is still in many senses closer.

Not close, neither is in the foreseeable future, though the future is exceptionally foggy right now.

* at a minimum, I'd expect a reversal of Brexit needing both that polls show at least 2:1 in favour sustained for a year, and also that anti-EU parties like Reform weren't one of the top two polling parties

I think the one scenario that could work for Brejoin is if Labour rebranded itself as the rejoin party to stave off the threat from the Greens.

The Remain contingent is lost anyways. The other side of the electorate is turned off by their waffling. This would give them a cause to rally around and allow them to consolidate their electorate again.

With enough Brexit voters now either dead (they skewed old!) or having changed their mind, plus younger folks that weren't eligible to vote back then being very pro-EU, that might just do it.

The US' ongoing hostility towards Canada is decimating the relationship. The auto sector chaos inflicted by the US has destroyed decades of cross-border integration that benefited both countries, and it is now resulting in the cancellation of major projects (like the Honda $15 billion dollar Ontario EV project being scrapped). The trust Canada had shared with the US as relationship that benefited both countries is gone.

The sad thing is that the relationship probably cannot be rebuilt anytime soon. It will take decades to restore trust that was damaged in a few short years. Canada is forced to diversify and build closer relationships with less volatile nations across the world. This is probably good for Canada in the long term.

Indeed. But EU membership? Even at speed and with mutual will on both sides, I would expect it to be the work of 7-10 years to get past all the hurdles to Canada becoming a full member of the EU. Even just in car manufacturing, while getting stability would help eventually, in the short term I would expect anything like this to add more chaos just by changing from US-centric to EU-centric rules; and then add agriculture, fishing, etc.

I don't understand: the commonwealth isn't a hierarchical international organization that really prohibits anything. It is merely a shared state figurehead, and that figurehead is notable for having only a symbolic role in the governance of a given commonwealth country.

More specifically, it's not a suicide pact: the UK is welcome to be asinine, and we're welcome to ignore it.

Have you peeped outside? It's a very odd day indeed, and tomorrow will be odder still. So goes this era.

The hard thing about EEA is that you are effectively giving up more sovereignty than with full EU membership: You still have to follow most EU rules, but you give up your seat at the table when they're decided.

Might be a hard sell.

Yeah, but you get free access to the EU market. That's the sell.

Sure, but at that point why not shoot for full membership and be a rule-maker instead of a rule-taker?

Because that's an even harder sell. You typically need a referendum to access EU, but for EEA you typically don't. This alone, in the era of social media, makes it super hard.

It's not NA, or at least "the USA" any more, it's Trumpistan. I can see why you'd want to move rapidly away from that.

Also, Canada already has a land border with the EU, so this is just taking the next logical step.

Let’s start with Eurovision.

Amazing how the 'Eu' started to resemble the British Empire for some reason...

I don't see it.

You're an idiot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com