Good. The EU is an economic and political union so facilitating trade and movement between political allies seems only natural.
Anyway, I would love it if Canada joins the free movement zone and Schengen eventually however despite not knowing what is this "associate member" thing is sounds like a stretch. Imagine though, how cool would be to travel to between America and Europe without your passport, like a domestic flight.
I'm really not fan of the trend to devide this rock in space into zones where you need a reason and permission based on that reason to travel. Can't be happier that there's a progress towards making the world a friendlier place.
Much more likely is looser employment visas and maybe allowing Canadians have an easier time moving for things like retirement, etc. I'm not holding my breath, though.
What you're thinking about is the "single market" - which, even if the name could deceive, also applies to people, including the right to go work anywhere within the single market for citizens of single market countries. Which is what many brits always hated, as they wanted single market for services and goods, but not for people.
Single market doesn't imply Schengen though - eg I as an EU citizen have the right to move to Ireland for work, but I still need to go through border checks as Ireland is outside of Schengen (because they have free movement with NI).
Some want to be ensured Canada's sovereignty isn't changed. As this as of right now is a news headline I get their point of view for now.
I think a lot of people who argued for brexit did so mostly out of ignorance.
"There are regulations on bananas, this makes things inefficient!" (forgetting that the regulations on bananas was about categorising them, not forbidding sale).
They felt out of touch and disconnected from EU parliament, and it seemed complicated and scary. Ironically the reason it's so complicated is because it's a lot more democratic than our own systems- but instead of attempting to understand it they threw their hands up and thought "since I didn't vote for every person who works there, it must be undemocratic!"
It's very true that there was an anti-migration sentiment inside brexit, but I wouldn't go nearly so far as to say that this was the only feeling people had.
I'd say it's mostly feeling a loss of control, which they couldn't place and our politicians were not open enough about explaining that this loss of control of the population was caused by.... the politicians themselves.
Yeah, the EU is essentially run by the national governments.
However, they typically (and the UK were particularly bad here) use the EU as a scape-goat for unpopular decisions even when they'd agreed to them in Brussels.
Understandable, but bad for Europe/EU in general.
Fishing being the obvious example. I'd never seen many people care about fishing rights until it was suddenly a hot topic leading up to the vote, but suddenly people really cared about what was happening around the scottish coastline