Tag Archives: European Union

Cringe-worthy Seinfeld exchanges over Europe

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The PM was absent, off in Montreal for a digital asbestos announcement and the start of his EU summit. Pierre Poilievre was present, and he led off in French, and he accused the PM of trying to distract Canadians who can’t afford food or housing with the “associate member” conversation with the European Union, which got “rejected,” and noted that nine members of the EU haven’t ratified the existing trade agreement and wants an assurance that they will do so. Steven MacKinnon good up to praise the summit with EU leaders, and said that they were hoping to collaborate on a number of areas beyond trade. Poilievre switched to English to make the same accusation with the dated accusation that it was a “Seinfeld summit—a meeting about nothing.” (Who makes Seinfeld references anymore?) MacKinnon said the only one who knows about Seinfeld is Poilievre who wakes up and lives the same day every day, before praising the summit and the cooperation beyond trade. Poilievre insisted that the recurring nightmare was what Canadians live when they can’t afford to live, blamed government spending on inflation (false), and said the PM acts like George Costanza, running around the office trying to look busy. MacKinnon says that Poilievre acts like Kramer who just walks into the room and says something weird, before he praised free trade and collaboration with Europe, particularly on defence and procurement, as well as cooperating on democracy. Poilievre then got up and smirked, said everybody loves Kramer, and says that what’s weird is the EU’s carbon border adjustments and demanded that our goods not be subjected to them. MacKinnon noted that among the cooperation includes energy and patted himself on the back for west coast LNG going to Germany. Poilievre went into a rant about affordability and called this agreement another PR stunt, to which MacKinnon reminded him that the trade agreement with Europe is in effect even if not completely ratified, and that we are on track to doubling our non-US exports. Poilievre accused then of hubris for praising announcements they have not kept, and he then railed about beef and pork exports and called the summit a “nothingburger.” MacKinnon listed areas of cooperation and threw in a few Carney slogans along the way.

Christine Normandin led for the Bloc, and she too worried about the carbon border adjustments and how the federal abandonment of climate policy could negatively impact Quebec. MacKinnon insisted this was misinformed and listed the areas of cooperation once again. Normandin repeated her concerns that even if Quebec continues its carbon prices, their exports could still be exposed to those tariffs. MacKinnon praised how green Quebec’s aluminium sector is, and suggested that if they were concerned about GHGs, they should support high-speed rail. Mario Simard raised the auditor General’s report on pesticide management and how this too could impact trade with Europe. MacKinnon ignored this and just praised areas of collaboration.

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Danielle Smith gets her shiny PONI

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Prime Minister Mark Carney was in Fort McMurray yesterday to announce what we all knew was coming—that the proposed new west coast pipeline, now named “Pacific Link,” will formally be designated as the country’s first PONI (Project of National Interest). But let’s remember what got us here—the MOU with Alberta was supposed to have a number of conditions checked off before this could go ahead, most of which they either fudged. There is no private sector proponent. There is no Indigenous buy-in. The Pathways Project was supposed to be a mandatory component, but they then downgraded its obligations so that what it will capture will be a miniscule fraction of the emissions generated to fill the pipeline. There are no commitments to fill the pipeline or buyers for the product, and by the time it gets built, countries will be further along the decarbonization route as they accelerate their plans following the conflict in Iran, and we’ll just be pumping more product into an overall global supply glut which will further depress prices, making production less attractive.

The Indigenous component is a big question mark here, because the Major Projects Office did “consultations” with 110 First Nations communities over two months, and from the sounds of it, it was mostly junior staffers. This is clearly insufficient, and shows that they haven’t learned from past mistakes. When Trans Mountain was going through, one of the things that they needed to do was have the minister do face-to-face meetings, and that was the only thing that would satisfy many of these communities, which did not happen here. “We want to build faster,” and mouthing all of the right things about working with Indigenous communities, but you can’t even learn how to avoid the same problems that plagued the previous project? What exactly do they think they’re doing?

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3mwu2c3n3ic2y

Meanwhile, Carney continues to fraudulently claim that this oil will be “low carbon,” which it absolutely won’t be. And for everything he has capitulated to Danielle Smith to make this happen, it will win him exactly nothing with Alberta. Remember how much goodwill Justin Trudeau got when he gave supports to the province during their oil recession that Harper refused to, or when he created special orphan wells projects during the pandemic, or when he burned all of his political capital and environmental goodwill to ensure that Trans Mountain got built? Oh, right—it was none, and they continued to blame him for the oil price crash of 2014, before he was even in office. Yeah, Carney will get nothing from this, and Smith will just take this as a sign that threatening separation gets her what she wants, so she’ll just continue to find new ways to level threats. Carney has played himself, once again.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-10-01T13:08:05.385Z

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Never missing an opportunity to be himself

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For Truth and Reconciliation Day yesterday, the prime minister was in Edmonton (as he’s still on his oil and gas announcement tour), and gave the usual assurances that this is a process and a journey we are all on, but there didn’t appear to be much in the way of firm commitments on a renewed push for action, and when you consider that his government has been slowly walking back from commitments around the environment, or their shameful walking back of the rights that were expressed in the previous government’s version of the clean drinking water legislation, well, it’s a reminder that a lot of the things Carney says when it comes to his commitments to things tend to be somewhat tenuous and vulnerable to being walked back.

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre decided that he couldn’t resist a moment to keep being his worst self, so he put out a statement that blamed residential schools on “government interference,” which is what he’s also blaming Alberta separatism on. (When all you have is a hammer…) One probably shouldn’t be too surprised at just how much he completely missed the point in all of this, or the fact that he’s making this all about his faux grievances and bugaboos rather than about the truth of what Canada as a whole perpetrated, or to making any commitment to doing better in the future. Because of course not. This is Poilievre we’re talking about.

Only Pierre Poilievre could turn Truth and Reconciliation Day into a gripe about federal government "intrusion."

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-30T20:38:11.023Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-09-30T19:08:01.442Z

My Latest:

My column wonders why Mark Carney seems so eager to go along with the Big Lie that underpins the referendum that Danielle Smith has engendered.

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MPs increasingly relying on digital asbestos

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An analysis from The Economist estimates that one-fifth of all of the words spoken in our House of Commons originally came from digital asbestos. That same analysis puts us on par with Australia, whereas the UK Parliament’s House of Commons is about one-tenth (though it also found the House of Lords at a higher percentage). At first blush, this figure seems high, if only because supposed “AI-detectors” are not necessarily that accurate, and we have a high degree of rote speechifying in our Parliament, in large part because MPs especially rely on the talking points supplied to them by their leaders’ offices, while backbench MPs have access to speeches written by civil servants on the topic of certain bills (and yes, I do find this practice absolutely scandalous). On the other hand, it doesn’t come as a complete surprise to me because our parliamentarians are so reliant on scripts that they don’t write themselves that learning that those who prepare these speeches are offloading the process onto digital asbestos would be fitting—especially because the Carney government is so committed to boosting the use of this digital asbestos.

The solution to this, of course, is to ban prepared speeches, which we should have done decades ago. As I wrote in my book, there is a 1956 Speaker’s ruling about the only acceptable uses of prepared speeches that we need to return to, because the current state of affairs is untenable. There is no excuse for MPs to spend their days reading prepared speeches into the record that nobody pays attention to, only to fill time. You can get battle droids to do this job (and vote on command for the party line). If we want to reclaim our Parliament, the first step is banning these speeches and changing the speaking clocks so we don’t have MPs just filling time for twenty-minute stretches. Continuing with the status quo is just ridiculous at this point.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-09-24T19:08:02.855Z

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A future alliance whose shape requires negotiation

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Mark Carney delivered his speech to the European parliament in Strasbourg, and got heckled by a far-right MEP, because of course he did. Most of the speech was pretty standard Carney fare, with a historical anecdote, talk about upheavals and ruptures, sovereignty and digital asbestos, praising what Canada has to offer. He then moved toward welcoming the “ambition” of what Ursula von der Leyen spoke about with “associate membership” without actually saying that it’s what he wants, and spoke about things like the Erasmus+ programme, and other opportunities for cooperation.

Of course, everything remains up for negotiation, and what shape this kind of new agreement will look like is yet to be discussed, but Carney promises a vote in Parliament on whatever the final package is, which is not unexpected. Any treaty accession requires parliamentary approval regardless, but expect much caterwauling about this from certain suspects. There will no doubt be more threats from Trump and certain segments of this country who will insist that we’re just trying to provoke Trump, or that we’re somehow abandoning the US (we’re not) or that this is has something to do with Beijing (it doesn’t), but that’s also a reflection of the state of discourse.

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre is trying to insist that this alliance of the future, which hasn’t even begun negotiation, is a done deal and that Carney has been lying about it all the time, while he rails about “EU taxes, EU bureaucracy, and EU migrant crisis,” even though this has nothing to do with this kind of alliance because we’re not becoming members of the EU, and more to the point, we’re not sitting next to Syria or North Africa, so we don’t have boats of migrants coming over. Of course, Poilievre and his caucus will raise these things because they have a voter base whose brains have been rotted on Fox News and the like, and have been conditioned to rail about how Europe is being overrun by Muslim migrants who are “killing its culture,” and yes, Poilievre and his MPs are playing directly to these racist tropes. (Poilievre then slipped out the back from his caucus retreat rather than take reporters’ questions, so there’s also that).

Gods bless David Cochrane for trying to push back against the dumbest of Conservative talking points on this EU stuff, while new critic Eric Duncan is just mindlessly repeating the three talking points his leader gave him. #PnPCBC

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-17T21:30:27.904Z

Noted media critic Andrew Scheer is currently having a toddler meltdown.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-17T19:47:28.443Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-09-17T19:08:02.736Z

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Choose your own associate membership adventure

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Yesterday in Strasbourg, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen gave her state of the union address to the European Parliament, and said that she wanted Canada to become the first “associate member” of the EU, which is not a Thing, and suddenly had a bunch of people’s backs up about it. Our new ambassador to the EU, Jonathan Wilkinson, poured a bunch of cold water on this suggestion, essentially saying that we need to define what this relationship is supposed to mean before we can actually assign any kind of label to it. Other European countries who are waiting for membership are also questioning what this means (including Ukraine), especially because there is a huge process around actual EU membership, and a lot of questions about what the obligations/benefits equation, and levels of integration, because there are already relationships that the EU has with other European countries that aren’t full membership. Carney’s speech will be today.

As Lauren notes, the CAP would be an eye-opener for Canadian ag. Add to that the Euro + the ECB stuff. And then there is the 'four freedoms'….hmmm.I'm not an EU expert, but I follow European politics enough to understand what *full* 'membership' means. Nein, danke. bsky.app/profile/ldob…

— Kevin Milligan (@kevinmilligan.bsky.social) 2026-09-16T15:17:45.192Z

Meanwhile, after Trump signed a memorandum to ban Canadian products from US federal procurement, he had a whole unhinged rant about how any “associate membership” deal with the EU would be considered a “hostile act” with new tariffs on Europe, in violation of the agreement he signed with them thirteen months ago—because he’s totally making the case that their attempted new trade deal wasn’t impacting on Canada’s sovereignty and would give Americans control over our other trading relationships. Then again, Trump also went on an absolutely incoherent rant about cutting off trade with countries and pocketing the “deficit” which makes no sense because that’s not what a trade deficit means, but his brain is rotted and he has no conception of any economic concepts, so it’s hopeless, but that doesn’t mean people won’t still try to implement these decisions in order to curry favour.

I fear that people might be getting sick of hearing my views on the world.So this time, an open thread for econ faculty to grade this submission on the meaning of a trade deficit.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) 2026-09-16T23:45:58.544Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-09-16T13:08:03.577Z

My Latest:

My column points to how Americans, and Democrats in particular, are trying to guilt-trip us into backing down on counter-tariffs than actually cleaning up their own mess.

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There’s no such thing as associate membership in the EU

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Because everything is stupid, over the weekend, an American newspaper made reference to prime minister Mark Carney working toward “associate membership” with the European Union, which to be clear, is not actually a Thing. It’s not a real title, and means nothing. That didn’t stop the Conservatives from rising up en masse to declare this to be the worst thing ever. Remember that this crew has more than a few people in their ranks who believed that Brexit was a good thing, and lent their support to the cause. And so, Pierre Poilievre decried that we weren’t going to be the 51st state, or the 28th state in the EU, and then decried the whole thing, and demanded Parliament be recalled (it’s back next week regardless), and that he doesn’t have a mandate for this, so he would need an election. Other members of the caucus chimed in with their own bugaboos around “mass migration” and so on, because of course they did. But remember that at no time did anyone say anything about actually joining the EU.

I’m just getting so tired of this desperate search for relevance in the current moment. We’re not going to be EU members. “Associate membership” is not the same thing, and it’s especially nowhere near forced annexation by the US. Grow the fuck up, guys. We need a competent opposition party.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-13T20:22:37.264Z

Carney and his office had to engage in damage control to insist that Canada is not seeking EU membership (which we can’t join anyway, because it’s quite explicit in their constitution that it’s not open if you’re not in Europe), but that he is merely seeking an “unique alliance,” to which the EU will be opening an “antenna office” in Ottawa to help with coordination. None of this is EU membership. But that didn’t stop the Conservatives from going absolutely haywire over it, because they can’t resist the siren song of American culture war bullshit, where the far-right derides “decadent” Europe and claim that it’s dying economically and socially, while they act as catspaws for the tech bros who resent that Europe is trying to regulate the internet and force them to be responsible, which they don’t want to be, and for which they’ve coopted the US government to protecting them. More than anything, this is just a sign of how desperate and grasping the Conservatives have become for relevance in the current moment. It was a pathetic display that just demonstrates how adrift they are as a party.

My Latest:

  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take has a concrete suggestion for what the new Digital Transformation Canada should be doing, and it’s not pushing more digital asbestos.
  • For National Magazine, I delve into Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision on sentencing delays and why they’re fundamentally different from pre-trial delays.
  • My weekend column calls out Evan Solomon for complicity in manufacturing consent for worse digital asbestos outcomes, including deaths, rather than regulating it.

New episodes released early for C$7+ subscribers. This week I talk about the Alberta referendum and why it won't solve the imaginary grievances Albertans have been told to believe in. #cdnpoli

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-14T02:20:29.215Z

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