In her “State of the European Union” address on September 16, 2026, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered Canada the opportunity to be the first-ever “associate member” of the EU in order to “advance the relationship to the highest level.” With Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in attendance, she stressed that she wants to work on an “alliance for the future” to cooperate on a variety of topics, forging a technology alliance, including on intelligent manufacturing, an integrated defense industrial base, a joint Arctic project as well a close cooperation on energy, critical minerals and batteries, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and cyberspace.
This ambition has not come out of the blue. The EU-Canada partnership is already well advanced: In 2017, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) entered into force provisionally. Since then, trade in goods and services has increased by over 81 percent (2016 to 2025). In addition, the EU and Canada signed a Security and Defense Partnership in June 2025, covering military interoperability, maritime and space security, and hybrid threats, among other things. Both sides also signed a strategic Partnership on Raw Materials (June 2021) as well as a Digital Partnership (December 2025). Canada is also allied with many EU member states via NATO, and is a G7 member.
Wanting More
However, in the current geoeconomic environment, the EU wants more: New and innovative alliances are needed now that the traditional transatlantic partnership with the United States—historically the backbone of European integration and alliances—has come under threat. In addition, the EU also feels the pressure from another major player: China is exporting its subsidized overcapacities to Europe, creating vast, unsustainable trade imbalances and leading to fears of European deindustrialization (something von der Leyen also mentioned in her speech).
Due to this squeeze from both Washington and Beijing, the EU wants to develop new partnerships in the direction of an “alliance of middle powers,” which Carney sketched out in a widely discussed speech at the World Economic Forum this February in Davos. This is why the EU, which is usually quite inflexible when it comes to offering membership, proposed a new alignment with Ottawa as the first associate member.
However, there is no blueprint for this. Associate member status has not yet been enshrined in the European treaties. Therefore, it is still unclear what “associate membership” would mean in practice, also because the European Commission did not elaborate on the concept before proposing it. For the moment, it seems to be a rather normative concept to enable even closer cooperation between the EU and Canada, without the latter becoming a full member of the EU. It’s also likely that von der Leyen wanted to prove that the EU continues to be an attractive partner in the world, after the negative referendum in Iceland on resuming membership talks with the EU in late August.
Limitations and Potentials
What could be achieved realistically? A true EU membership with an alignment of rules and regulations seems far-fetched, not least because Canada is not a European country; the EU treaties are quite strict on this. Also, Ottawa is unlikely to really want to adopt all the EU standards of the common market.
This associate membership then would probably move the EU-Canada alliance closer to a cooperation in the style of the European Economic Area (EEA)—which binds non-members such as Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein to the EU—or an economic and security partnership. But immediate steps to force closer EU-Canadian ties are possible: In the economic field, CETA (which still has not been ratified by all European Union member states) could be broadened and modernized, allowing for close cooperation on economic security and supply chain resilience. Partnerships in raw materials and energy could be strengthened, as Canada has high reserves of cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements.
The digital partnership could be upgraded to a digital trade agreement (including AI and quantum computing), possibly within the context of the broader scope of the CPTPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (of which Ottawa is a member). In addition, Canada could become an integral part of the political defense and cooperation of the EU, relating to Ukraine or the Arctic. Also, people-to-people contacts could be improved with a more stringent participation of Canada in EU programs like Erasmus or Horizon.
Although the term “associate membership” for Canada is mostly a cipher for closer cooperation, it nevertheless holds a lot of potential, provided member states get behind von der Leyen’s deft move. In the long term, closer cooperation with Canada could be a first step toward a new network of democratic partners, the so-called middle power alliance, which Carney proposed in Davos.
This may potentially also be an interesting concept for the EU’s ex-member, the United Kingdom. A renewed participation in the common market and a customs union, with free movement of people, is not feasible for London, but an “associate membership” (meaning close cooperation) may well be. And an EU-UK-Canada alliance would already be an impressive nucleus of an alliance of middle powers.
Claudia Schmucker is the director of the Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, and Technology Center at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).
Linn Selle is the Alfred von Oppenheim director of the German Council on Foreign Relations’ (DGAP) Europe Center.
