Canada will be competing in Eurovision 2027 in May. :)

Freedom of movement with the EU and no border with the USA hm....

> and legislative integration

Does Canada's agricultural output follow EU's (quite strict) norms? Not sure if this falls under "legislative integration" but I'd say that it would be quite important to have settled. The same goes when it comes to Canada's work-related laws.

Yup. Oh no, my meat isn't pumped full of hormones and vacuums aren't allowed to be hearing-damagingly loud. The horror..

Also re: OP, yes if you want to sell stuff in the EU, you will need to adhere to the same rules as EU companies.

Yeah, I'm curious about which ones are a problem. I could see there being some incompatibility, and the details are more interesting than sweeping statements.

Some regulations would have to be normalized and agreed upon between the countries for trade open up. Can't have different quality standards and ways of evaluating and declaring them.

As a Swede I have a bunch of grievances with the EU but when I look at the US I can't help but feel how lucky I am to live on this side of the pond.

How dare the EU try to preserve competitive open markets. We can’t have capitalism in the leveragist serfdom economy!

We should keep open to the option that they might both loose.

In what way has "China already won"?

Because the US is going to throw Poland under the bus without even considering once if it yields a short-term benefit.

If "70% of Canadian exports are to the US", that's probably why the US has so much leverage, and I can see why the Canadian government would like a change. Hence the need for a rebalancing of trade partnerships.

Deals right now are intended to increase the trades between Canada and reducing those with the US, in little improvement steps.

If in 10 years the ratio moves from 70/6 to 50/26, the situation will be vastly different.

The options are not black and white

Isn't the point that there already is one?

So the assumption is trading with Canada = trade war with US? Canada is abused pretty hard it seems...

It's not that they want to enter a trade war with Trump, it's that there's large room for growth in trade between Canada and Poland (your example).

Since Trump is hostile to trade with both parties there's an opportunity to replace lost US trade that's probably not coming back.

Trump has weakened himself and his allies where as mutual trade between Canada and the EU makes both stronger.

Because the US is likely to ally with Russia over Poland.

Because Trump is trade warring everyone.

The middle democracies will do better fighting together and not deal with US individually.

Polish export to US is about 3% of its total export and import - about 5% of Poland's total import. Not much to lose, honestly. We trade more with Czech Republic.

Polish export to EU is 74% of its total export and import is about 60% of its total import.

Economically - whatever's good for EU is good for Poland and US barely matters.

> One thing that is common about middle democracies is that prioritize a bureaucratic elite structure over an entrepreneurship culture

No, that's just the 2010s propaganda fed to you by people who assert that not letting them do whatever they want is "bureaucratic". These very same people are completely fine lobbying legislature for more moat when they benefit from it.

The difference between "middle democracies" or whatever that means and the US is just that politics aren't corrupted enough yet that they can buy whatever they want.

It's interesting to me that people generally see Europe's regulations as interfering with entrepreneurship, while they see American decisions that give more power to multinational corporations at the expense of smaller companies as a normal part of a free market.

"If they changed that they'd perhaps become world powers themselves."

If they were to change some within the citizenry would stand to gain at the expense of others. Inequality would increase.

Seems—for now—middle democracies aren't prepared to pay the high price of social upheaval such a policy would create.

The CCP retains too much power over businesses and business leaders for me to consider them to "embrace entrepreneurship wholeheartedly."

The US _also_ embraces rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and the externalization of social and environmental costs as entrepreneurship.

Didn’t China force Meta to unwind Manus? In no way is China embracing entrepreneurs wholeheartedly.

This is just wrong. The US prioritizes billionaires over entrepreneurs.

No it does not. There's a lot of gold plating happening at the national level that goes beyond EU regulations. It's EU regulations + 27 national regulations in reality. The EU economies are still too different and the population too unwilling to have a truly US-style single market.

The EU is not a fiscal union. It is also not yet a single capital market.

Maybe, but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU.

Not because I think regulations are bad. But regulations need to be well designed with clears lines on what the Federal / State are allowed to do.

It's more about predictability.

America's become erratic and untrustworthy. America's made a deliberate choice make its reputation worse.

The true treasure is the friendship we made along the way.

There is a friendly trusting common values part to this too.

Why not both?

Friendship is about values?

Blackberry might not be, but RIM are still around, QNX is still in use.

Not if we kick off WW3 as a last ditch attempt to hold on to the old order ;)

"Annexing neighbour" is clearly a non-goal of the EU. One of the reason of its existence is to put an end to european countries invading each others all the time.

> The UK left

Yes, you can read all about how that came about, and how it's going.

> The EU does not have a military to annex any neighbours with. Individual states do, but non are really great powers any more.

You're projecting an American ideal. Not all nations are--nor want to be--America, and we're thankful for that.

Sure, but Turkey is also an authoritarian autocracy, which I think might be a bit of a problem for the EU.

Fear that Turkey would be "imminently" joining the EU was one of the scare stories used by the Brexit campaign in the UK.

No, just too corrupt for the EU.

Those wind turbines are destroying the scenery, though.

If by screw things up you mean retain some level of governance then yes... Canada is a confederation, not a federation.