Summary

​ Summary

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is exploring closer economic ties with the European Union, aiming for a new relationship beyond NAFTA. This includes potential membership in the EU’s single market, collaboration on strategic industries like energy and defence, and even visa-free travel for Canadians in Europe. The move is partly a response to perceived economic and political shifts in the United States, particularly under the Trump administration.

​

Summary

​ Summary

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is exploring closer economic ties with the European Union, aiming for a new relationship beyond NAFTA. This includes potential membership in the EU’s single market, collaboration on strategic industries like energy and defence, and even visa-free travel for Canadians in Europe. The move is partly a response to perceived economic and political shifts in the United States, particularly under the Trump administration.

​

Carney has instructed his special envoy to Europe to scope out the most ambitious possibilities short of full membership in the EU or its common market, according to people familiar with the matter. The details are still being sketched by technical working groups for what the prime minister has told his aides will be the reorienting of an economy and a society that for half a century has been dominated by the U.S. 

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Council President António Costa join hands during the 20th EU-Canada summit last year. OLIVIER matthys/epA/shutterstock

To European leaders, Carney has even suggested Canada take on a new title: “Associate Member of the European Union.” The EU, not known for its flexible enforcement of membership rules, is open to the idea, officials from both sides say.

Alongside Carney’s established emissaries are informal advisers drawn from the worlds of finance and politics. Some are fellow members of a Book Club in Ottawa that he no longer has time to attend, who quip that they abide by the code of the movie “Fight Club”: “The first rule of Book Club,” several told the Journal, “is you do not talk about Book Club.”

The result of the monthslong talks: European and Canadian officials are eyeing ways in which Canada could informally lock into Europe’s $21 trillion single market in strategic supply chains such as energy, AI, the critical minerals needed for batteries or semiconductors and, most urgently, defense. 

In practice, Canadian goods, services and workers for those industries could eventually move frictionlessly between Europe and America’s northern neighbor, blurring the lines of where the EU’s economic borders end. In conversations with France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, speaks to Carney often, the idea has even come up to allow Canadians to live and work in Europe visa-free, two officials familiar with those discussions said. 

The two sides are talking about laying underwater cables to link Europe and Canada, and jointly constructing data centers, cloud storage and new satellite networks beyond the reach of American tech giants. Carney is pushing to lay the pipelines Canada needs to redirect gas—normally pumped across the U.S. border—to European allies still struggling to replace Russian energy. Icebreakers, in his vision, would clear an Arctic path for Canadian fertilizer to sail east, over the Northwest Passage that lured centuries of explorers into the Polar sea. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, and Finland President Alexander Stubb participate in a hockey practice earlier this year. Spencer Colby/CP/AP

Canada and the EU are looking to intertwine research institutions to create a network of scientific output to compete with the U.S. university system. Carney is pressing to join the EU’s study-abroad program, as well, hoping a generation of Europeans and Canadians will attend university in each other’s homelands. 

The full scope of the talks, often mired in technical details like European rules-of-origin codes, has barely registered in the White House. But it adds up to one of the world’s most significant—and risky—reactions to the second Trump presidency. Canada ships two-thirds of its exports across the world’s longest land border. The two countries have been twin pillars of the economic, geostrategic alliance called the West, and the White House is wagering their interdependencies will drag Canada back to the negotiating table, concessions in hand. 

Carney—who studied in Europe, met his wife in the U.K. and ran the Bank of England for seven years—is placing a counter-bet that he can shift the country once known as British North America back toward the Old Continent. 

An LNG carrier docked at a Canadian export facility in Kitimat, British Columbia.  Jesse Winter/Reuters

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada was the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 51st state of the United States?” asked Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who speaks regularly with Carney. 

Any new alliance faces potential stumbling blocks. Although Carney is hugely popular for now, his domestic standing could erode as Canadians absorb the full consequences of a realignment. Wrangling with separatists in Alberta and Quebec, Ottawa might bristle at relinquishing any sovereignty to link into the EU. Countries that trade freely with the EU typically pay into the EU budget, accept its workers and follow its regulations. Moreover, Europe would be hard-pressed to substitute for the southbound trade once heralded by Nafta, with an economy growing at half the pace of America’s.

“As the U.S. is reducing its role as the global consumer of last resort, it is not clear that either Canada or the EU are ready to take up that mantle to absorb each other’s production,” said a U.S. official.

In private discussions, some of Europe’s most senior officials have worried about grounding Carney’s ambitions to reality. Ten European countries have yet to ratify a previous trade agreement with Canada reached a decade ago.

In their meetings, EU officials have tried to probe whether their Canadian visitors are using them as props in counter-negotiations with Washington. Scarred by Brexit, they can’t offer Carney terms so generous that other members think of leaving and demanding a Canada-style arrangement.

Still, some European officials are starting to see the Maple Leaf nation as a test of whether their famously bureaucratic union can offer new, more malleable terms of inclusion for like-minded democracies looking for reliable partners. Earlier this week, senior EU officials debriefed European ambassadors in the glass-paneled Brussels office tower popularly known as “the Space Egg.” The message: If talks succeed, Canada will become closer than any other country outside Europe.

On Thursday, Carney will address the European Parliament to flesh out his vision to link up with Europe. The two sides will announce a number of new working groups at a bilateral summit soon after to try to turn ideas into concrete projects. 

Wall Street Journal reporters spoke to officials from a dozen different governments involved in those conversations, who broadly described a prime minister whose ambitions—to make Canada European again, some joked—go beyond what Carney has publicly detailed. While there are multiple hurdles to dance around, European officials envision major Canadian companies could effectively lock in as single market suppliers for decades to come. Though officials stress they are hiding nothing from the White House, they share a new wariness toward the U.S. and its tech giants: Some on both sides have quietly stopped using U.S. platforms like Gmail or WhatsApp. 

“This is tectonic change by working groups and bureaucracy. It’s terribly unsexy but terribly consequential nonetheless,” said one Canadian official involved in the talks. 

Back to the future

A truck crosses into the U.S. on the Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images

Canada’s pivot to Europe is a back-to-the-future moment for a country that traded more with Europe than America on the eve of World War II. Its oldest citizens grew up as British subjects, its anglophones reading English literature like John Buchan, the Scottish novelist who became Canada’s 15th governor general. French Canadians, of course, had their own particular links to Europe.

“In those days, Canadians could be on Monday, Wednesday and Friday North Americans, the other days of the week they could be part of the British network of nations and benefit from both,” said Norman Hillmer, one of the leading scholars on North American relations. 

President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney face reporters after a 1984 White House meeting.  Ron Edmonds/AP

Canada emerged from the war into a new world order of global trade shaped around the economic powerhouse of America. While Britain and Europe focused on rebuilding their shattered economies and shed far-off empires, Canadian business looked south, influenced by the dynamic consumer culture and the lure of the dollar. By 1950, 65% of Canada’s exports went to America; just 15% went to the U.K.

American colleges became incubators of a new Canadian elite, whose parents had attended British universities; by the late 60s, those campuses also fostered a Vietnam-era counterculture that was skeptical of American power.

The tractor-beam of Americanization was briefly interrupted when Richard Nixon imposed 10% tariffs on all imports—to stabilize the dollar after the end of the gold standard. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded by pledging to increase trade with the European common market and its newest member, the U.K. It bore little fruit, and was eclipsed entirely when his conservative successor, Brian Mulroney won the 1984 election and began working with Ronald Reagan on what would evolve into Nafta. Canadians skeptical of integrating North America’s two largest economies wore pins that read “51st state: Mulroney for Governor.”

Mark Carney speaks at a press conference in Ottawa after trade talks with the U.S. collapsed. Dave Chan/AFP/Getty Images

Nafta transformed Canadian society. As the country welcomed the new millennium, ties to Europe had faded, especially as a new crop of immigrant Canadians arrived from Asia and the Caribbean. On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, America’s economy was integrating so fast with its neighbors that several U.S. state legislatures felt compelled to pass resolutions opposing a “North American Union” with a single, Euro-style currency. 

That year, the Bank of Canada appointed a new governor, 42-year-old Mark Carney, who had emerged from both shores of the trans-Atlantic elite, graduating from Harvard and meeting his British wife at Oxford, where both played ice hockey. 

The bruising recession that followed left the central banker convinced the global economy had become too dependent on the U.S. and its reserve currency. As governor of the Bank of England, he advocated for medium-size countries to find, or invent, a dollar alternative. London by then was extracting itself from the EU, an ironic crash course in European bureaucracy for a technocrat now trying to lead Canada the other way.

When Carney ran for prime minister, his Liberal party had been in power for 10 years and he faced a 25-point deficit in the polls. It turned around almost immediately after Trump began threatening to turn Canada into the 51st state.

Last week, Trump posted an AI-generated image of him standing over Carney with a hockey stick and a speech bubble saying “get up Governor!” Carney has defined the strains in bilateral relations as “a rupture, not a transition,” warning Canadians the profound political shifts unleashed by Trump are likely to outlast his term. 

It “is the end of history for more than 100 years of close American-Canadian cooperation,” Hillmer said. 

Carney, right, is greeted by Emmanuel Macron, President of France, during the June 15 G-7 summit. Christopher Katsarov/CP/AP

Other fish in the sea

Within days of taking office Carney’s team began to map the deals that the U.K., Norway, Switzerland and post-Soviet nation of Georgia had with the EU, short of full membership. They made a list of 36 functions nations perform for each other—passing along intelligence, or sharing regulations—and ticked the categories where Europe and Canada could do more together.  

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, center, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, left, and Mark Carney discuss Canada’s purchase of submarines manufactured by a German-Norwegian joint venture. Michael Kappeler/dpa/ZUMA Press

In conversations with European leaders he’d known as a central banker, Carney was workshopping proposals to deepen ties that were far ahead of most European officials. New ideas were flowing from conversations with members of his Book Club, the clique of senior figures in business and politics bonding over the short novels they had time to read. 

Many had lived in Europe, as students at Oxford or the London School of Economics, and had come to know each other when their children attended the same schools and summer camps. One Book Club member described the prime minister’s geopolitics using a dating metaphor: “Canadians should realize there are more fish in the sea than the United States.”

But when Carney appointed Canada’s special prime ministerial envoy to Europe, the veteran diplomat John Hannaford, last October, it took more than two months before EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen appointed his counterpart, a Dutch 30-year veteran of the Commission, Joost Korte. Several European leaders, including Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, were worried about provoking the U.S., European and Canadian officials said.

Two events—President Trump’s effort to gain control of Greenland and his war on Iran—jolted more European leaders to share Carney’s logic and urgency. Already speaking regularly to Stubb, Macron and Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Støre, the Canadian leader also began lobbying more Trump-friendly leaders, including Meloni. Early on, she was cautious about antagonizing Trump. After the president posted an AI-generated image of himself as pope in May, then claimed Meloni had begged him for a picture together, she changed tack. She now speaks to Carney more often than Trump, European officials said. 

By summer, Canadian and European officials were accelerating their discussions in a proliferating number of diplomatic backchannels. On the sidelines of the preliminary meetings for the G-7, in the French city of Toulouse, Canadian officials and their European counterparts sketched out what they called “11 stack items” for deepening collaboration and reducing dependence on American technologies, defense equipment and trade. 

Ahead of the G-7 leaders meeting in Evian, France, Carney met Macron in Paris and French officials came away floored by how fast the Canadians wanted to move. “Things suddenly accelerated to full-scale cooperation on many, many policies,” said a French diplomat.

Carney was by now speaking frequently with Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whom he knew from his time in banking, as the pair completed negotiations for Canada’s $25 billion purchase of German submarines.

In July, at the Ankara NATO summit, the leaders showcased the agreement in front of a meter-long mock-up of the submarine that German officials had flown into the Turkish capital wrapped in a protective cover that one official said resembled an Egyptian sarcophagus. When a photographer pointed out the model to the leaders, Carney quipped that “we didn’t notice it because of the advanced stealth characteristics” of the vessel.

After Carney’s somber press conference to explain the breakdown of U.S. talks and accuse Washington of moving the goal posts at the last minute, Merz reached out to the Canadian leader. 

As Trump was signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” Canadian diplomats were in Berlin for a day of meetings on defense cooperation. 

“This is Canada turning from looking at itself as a North American nation to a trans-Atlantic nation,” said a senior Canadian official. “Canadians, we sound like Americans, we dress like Americans, but as a society we’re much more European.”

Carney has instructed his special envoy to Europe to scope out the most ambitious possibilities short of full membership in the EU or its common market, according to people familiar with the matter. The details are still being sketched by technical working groups for what the prime minister has told his aides will be the reorienting of an economy and a society that for half a century has been dominated by the U.S. 

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Council President António Costa join hands during the 20th EU-Canada summit last year. OLIVIER matthys/epA/shutterstock

To European leaders, Carney has even suggested Canada take on a new title: “Associate Member of the European Union.” The EU, not known for its flexible enforcement of membership rules, is open to the idea, officials from both sides say.

Alongside Carney’s established emissaries are informal advisers drawn from the worlds of finance and politics. Some are fellow members of a Book Club in Ottawa that he no longer has time to attend, who quip that they abide by the code of the movie “Fight Club”: “The first rule of Book Club,” several told the Journal, “is you do not talk about Book Club.”

The result of the monthslong talks: European and Canadian officials are eyeing ways in which Canada could informally lock into Europe’s $21 trillion single market in strategic supply chains such as energy, AI, the critical minerals needed for batteries or semiconductors and, most urgently, defense. 

In practice, Canadian goods, services and workers for those industries could eventually move frictionlessly between Europe and America’s northern neighbor, blurring the lines of where the EU’s economic borders end. In conversations with France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, speaks to Carney often, the idea has even come up to allow Canadians to live and work in Europe visa-free, two officials familiar with those discussions said. 

The two sides are talking about laying underwater cables to link Europe and Canada, and jointly constructing data centers, cloud storage and new satellite networks beyond the reach of American tech giants. Carney is pushing to lay the pipelines Canada needs to redirect gas—normally pumped across the U.S. border—to European allies still struggling to replace Russian energy. Icebreakers, in his vision, would clear an Arctic path for Canadian fertilizer to sail east, over the Northwest Passage that lured centuries of explorers into the Polar sea. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, and Finland President Alexander Stubb participate in a hockey practice earlier this year. Spencer Colby/CP/AP

Canada and the EU are looking to intertwine research institutions to create a network of scientific output to compete with the U.S. university system. Carney is pressing to join the EU’s study-abroad program, as well, hoping a generation of Europeans and Canadians will attend university in each other’s homelands. 

The full scope of the talks, often mired in technical details like European rules-of-origin codes, has barely registered in the White House. But it adds up to one of the world’s most significant—and risky—reactions to the second Trump presidency. Canada ships two-thirds of its exports across the world’s longest land border. The two countries have been twin pillars of the economic, geostrategic alliance called the West, and the White House is wagering their interdependencies will drag Canada back to the negotiating table, concessions in hand. 

Carney—who studied in Europe, met his wife in the U.K. and ran the Bank of England for seven years—is placing a counter-bet that he can shift the country once known as British North America back toward the Old Continent. 

An LNG carrier docked at a Canadian export facility in Kitimat, British Columbia.  Jesse Winter/Reuters

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada was the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 51st state of the United States?” asked Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who speaks regularly with Carney. 

Any new alliance faces potential stumbling blocks. Although Carney is hugely popular for now, his domestic standing could erode as Canadians absorb the full consequences of a realignment. Wrangling with separatists in Alberta and Quebec, Ottawa might bristle at relinquishing any sovereignty to link into the EU. Countries that trade freely with the EU typically pay into the EU budget, accept its workers and follow its regulations. Moreover, Europe would be hard-pressed to substitute for the southbound trade once heralded by Nafta, with an economy growing at half the pace of America’s.

“As the U.S. is reducing its role as the global consumer of last resort, it is not clear that either Canada or the EU are ready to take up that mantle to absorb each other’s production,” said a U.S. official.

In private discussions, some of Europe’s most senior officials have worried about grounding Carney’s ambitions to reality. Ten European countries have yet to ratify a previous trade agreement with Canada reached a decade ago.

In their meetings, EU officials have tried to probe whether their Canadian visitors are using them as props in counter-negotiations with Washington. Scarred by Brexit, they can’t offer Carney terms so generous that other members think of leaving and demanding a Canada-style arrangement.

Still, some European officials are starting to see the Maple Leaf nation as a test of whether their famously bureaucratic union can offer new, more malleable terms of inclusion for like-minded democracies looking for reliable partners. Earlier this week, senior EU officials debriefed European ambassadors in the glass-paneled Brussels office tower popularly known as “the Space Egg.” The message: If talks succeed, Canada will become closer than any other country outside Europe.

On Thursday, Carney will address the European Parliament to flesh out his vision to link up with Europe. The two sides will announce a number of new working groups at a bilateral summit soon after to try to turn ideas into concrete projects. 

Wall Street Journal reporters spoke to officials from a dozen different governments involved in those conversations, who broadly described a prime minister whose ambitions—to make Canada European again, some joked—go beyond what Carney has publicly detailed. While there are multiple hurdles to dance around, European officials envision major Canadian companies could effectively lock in as single market suppliers for decades to come. Though officials stress they are hiding nothing from the White House, they share a new wariness toward the U.S. and its tech giants: Some on both sides have quietly stopped using U.S. platforms like Gmail or WhatsApp. 

“This is tectonic change by working groups and bureaucracy. It’s terribly unsexy but terribly consequential nonetheless,” said one Canadian official involved in the talks. 

Back to the future

A truck crosses into the U.S. on the Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images

Canada’s pivot to Europe is a back-to-the-future moment for a country that traded more with Europe than America on the eve of World War II. Its oldest citizens grew up as British subjects, its anglophones reading English literature like John Buchan, the Scottish novelist who became Canada’s 15th governor general. French Canadians, of course, had their own particular links to Europe.

“In those days, Canadians could be on Monday, Wednesday and Friday North Americans, the other days of the week they could be part of the British network of nations and benefit from both,” said Norman Hillmer, one of the leading scholars on North American relations. 

President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney face reporters after a 1984 White House meeting.  Ron Edmonds/AP

Canada emerged from the war into a new world order of global trade shaped around the economic powerhouse of America. While Britain and Europe focused on rebuilding their shattered economies and shed far-off empires, Canadian business looked south, influenced by the dynamic consumer culture and the lure of the dollar. By 1950, 65% of Canada’s exports went to America; just 15% went to the U.K.

American colleges became incubators of a new Canadian elite, whose parents had attended British universities; by the late 60s, those campuses also fostered a Vietnam-era counterculture that was skeptical of American power.

The tractor-beam of Americanization was briefly interrupted when Richard Nixon imposed 10% tariffs on all imports—to stabilize the dollar after the end of the gold standard. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded by pledging to increase trade with the European common market and its newest member, the U.K. It bore little fruit, and was eclipsed entirely when his conservative successor, Brian Mulroney won the 1984 election and began working with Ronald Reagan on what would evolve into Nafta. Canadians skeptical of integrating North America’s two largest economies wore pins that read “51st state: Mulroney for Governor.”

Mark Carney speaks at a press conference in Ottawa after trade talks with the U.S. collapsed. Dave Chan/AFP/Getty Images

Nafta transformed Canadian society. As the country welcomed the new millennium, ties to Europe had faded, especially as a new crop of immigrant Canadians arrived from Asia and the Caribbean. On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, America’s economy was integrating so fast with its neighbors that several U.S. state legislatures felt compelled to pass resolutions opposing a “North American Union” with a single, Euro-style currency. 

That year, the Bank of Canada appointed a new governor, 42-year-old Mark Carney, who had emerged from both shores of the trans-Atlantic elite, graduating from Harvard and meeting his British wife at Oxford, where both played ice hockey. 

The bruising recession that followed left the central banker convinced the global economy had become too dependent on the U.S. and its reserve currency. As governor of the Bank of England, he advocated for medium-size countries to find, or invent, a dollar alternative. London by then was extracting itself from the EU, an ironic crash course in European bureaucracy for a technocrat now trying to lead Canada the other way.

When Carney ran for prime minister, his Liberal party had been in power for 10 years and he faced a 25-point deficit in the polls. It turned around almost immediately after Trump began threatening to turn Canada into the 51st state.

Last week, Trump posted an AI-generated image of him standing over Carney with a hockey stick and a speech bubble saying “get up Governor!” Carney has defined the strains in bilateral relations as “a rupture, not a transition,” warning Canadians the profound political shifts unleashed by Trump are likely to outlast his term. 

It “is the end of history for more than 100 years of close American-Canadian cooperation,” Hillmer said. 

Carney, right, is greeted by Emmanuel Macron, President of France, during the June 15 G-7 summit. Christopher Katsarov/CP/AP

Other fish in the sea

Within days of taking office Carney’s team began to map the deals that the U.K., Norway, Switzerland and post-Soviet nation of Georgia had with the EU, short of full membership. They made a list of 36 functions nations perform for each other—passing along intelligence, or sharing regulations—and ticked the categories where Europe and Canada could do more together.  

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, center, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, left, and Mark Carney discuss Canada’s purchase of submarines manufactured by a German-Norwegian joint venture. Michael Kappeler/dpa/ZUMA Press

In conversations with European leaders he’d known as a central banker, Carney was workshopping proposals to deepen ties that were far ahead of most European officials. New ideas were flowing from conversations with members of his Book Club, the clique of senior figures in business and politics bonding over the short novels they had time to read. 

Many had lived in Europe, as students at Oxford or the London School of Economics, and had come to know each other when their children attended the same schools and summer camps. One Book Club member described the prime minister’s geopolitics using a dating metaphor: “Canadians should realize there are more fish in the sea than the United States.”

But when Carney appointed Canada’s special prime ministerial envoy to Europe, the veteran diplomat John Hannaford, last October, it took more than two months before EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen appointed his counterpart, a Dutch 30-year veteran of the Commission, Joost Korte. Several European leaders, including Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, were worried about provoking the U.S., European and Canadian officials said.

Two events—President Trump’s effort to gain control of Greenland and his war on Iran—jolted more European leaders to share Carney’s logic and urgency. Already speaking regularly to Stubb, Macron and Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Støre, the Canadian leader also began lobbying more Trump-friendly leaders, including Meloni. Early on, she was cautious about antagonizing Trump. After the president posted an AI-generated image of himself as pope in May, then claimed Meloni had begged him for a picture together, she changed tack. She now speaks to Carney more often than Trump, European officials said. 

By summer, Canadian and European officials were accelerating their discussions in a proliferating number of diplomatic backchannels. On the sidelines of the preliminary meetings for the G-7, in the French city of Toulouse, Canadian officials and their European counterparts sketched out what they called “11 stack items” for deepening collaboration and reducing dependence on American technologies, defense equipment and trade. 

Ahead of the G-7 leaders meeting in Evian, France, Carney met Macron in Paris and French officials came away floored by how fast the Canadians wanted to move. “Things suddenly accelerated to full-scale cooperation on many, many policies,” said a French diplomat.

Carney was by now speaking frequently with Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whom he knew from his time in banking, as the pair completed negotiations for Canada’s $25 billion purchase of German submarines.

In July, at the Ankara NATO summit, the leaders showcased the agreement in front of a meter-long mock-up of the submarine that German officials had flown into the Turkish capital wrapped in a protective cover that one official said resembled an Egyptian sarcophagus. When a photographer pointed out the model to the leaders, Carney quipped that “we didn’t notice it because of the advanced stealth characteristics” of the vessel.

After Carney’s somber press conference to explain the breakdown of U.S. talks and accuse Washington of moving the goal posts at the last minute, Merz reached out to the Canadian leader. 

As Trump was signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” Canadian diplomats were in Berlin for a day of meetings on defense cooperation. 

“This is Canada turning from looking at itself as a North American nation to a trans-Atlantic nation,” said a senior Canadian official. “Canadians, we sound like Americans, we dress like Americans, but as a society we’re much more European.”