Mark Carney's address to the European Parliament: "An alliance for the future"

Roberta Metsola's introduction for Prime Minister Mark Carney Dear colleagues, today we welcome the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, to our Parliament. Dear Mark, thank you for being here today. The friendship between the European Union and Canada is rooted in our shared values and outlook. It is built on the same understanding that united Canadians in 1867, and Europeans in 1951: that we are always stronger when we work together. Our partnership endures. It is grounded in the stories of our peoples. Many of those who helped build your nation were Europeans in search of a better life. And in our continent's darkest moments, Canadians were there for us. In 1914, when war shattered our continent, Canadians fought shoulder to shoulder with us through the muddy trenches of Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele. On Vimy Ridge, where your national memorial keeps watch, a corner of Europe will remain forever Canadian. A generation later, in 1944, your boys came to our aid again, storming Normandy's beaches alongside British and Americans to help liberate Europe from fascism. On that day, Canadian forces pushed farther inland than any other — and, in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, sustained heavy losses, but soldiered on. This sums up so much about the courageous Canadian spirit. Europe will always be grateful for the sacrifice of so many who stood with us and defended freedom and democracy. We will never forget. And it is with that spirit, and with the weight of that history, that we now look to the future together. Yesterday's announcement opening the door to deepening our alliance is a huge positive step forward, with potential for closer collaboration on the issues that matter to people, to families and to industry on both sides of the Atlantic. The potential exists for better cooperation on so many different levels, from defence and trade to energy, education and research. Together we can break new and exciting ground and ultimately improve lives. Today is another milestone in that shared journey. Your presence here could not be more significant. I know we are all looking forward to hearing you speak. So, without further ado, Prime Minister, dear Mark, thank you again for being here, and the floor is yours. Prime Minister Carney's address to the European Parliament Madam President Metsola, Madam President von der Leyen, honourable Members of the European Parliament, distinguished colleagues, thank you for granting me the honour of addressing you at the opening of this decisive session. Today I will speak about how our response to the current geopolitical rupture should incorporate a new dimension. But first, I would like to speak of something older — something that goes back long before relations between the European Union and Canada. Because the depth of our ties is not measured in trade flows, nor written into our treaties. Our ties are deeply rooted in our lands. In the heart of Germany, above Weimar, there is a wooded ridge called Ettersberg. For decades, Goethe walked, thought and wrote there. An oak on that ridge came to bear his name, a living monument to the highest ideals of European culture. As the 20th century turned dark, that same oak became trapped behind the barbed wire of Buchenwald, a silent witness to humanity's deepest moral failure. Goethe understood that ideals must be fought for, that values do not defend themselves. Indeed, at the end of Faust, the old man's last vision is of a free people on free ground. Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, der täglich sie erobern muß. Freedom and life must be earned every single day. Every day. Not once in 1945, or 1956, or 1989. Every day, including this one. Freedom was won through the heroism of the European resistance during the war. It was cultivated by the founders of the European Coal and Steel Community in the war's aftermath. It was fostered by the creation of the European Community. It was preserved by the establishment of the European Union. And it grew through its enlargement after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The values represented by Goethe's oak have also endured, in part because the ideals born in the shade of its branches crossed the Atlantic. In 1917, amidst the devastation of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, a young Canadian Lieutenant named Leslie Miller gathered a handful of acorns from the shattered European landscape. He carried them home and planted them in Canadian soil in Milliken, Ontario, where they grew into a majestic forest. A century later, a profound circle of renewal was completed. Grafts from Leslie Miller's Canadian oaks were repatriated to France and re-planted on the same Vimy ridge where they had been born. This is the essence of the Canada-European Union partnership. Seeds, values, ideas, trade, people and progress carried back and forth across the Atlantic for centuries. We are not fair-weather allies. We do not pursue zero-sum deals. Our commitment to the rule of law, and our unyielding defence of human dignity, individual freedom, and democracy share the same deep roots, the same unwavering dedication. We hold common values, for which we have always fought, and in whose defence we must always remain vigilant. We believe that a strong economy is not an end in itself but the means to a just society. We are committed stewards of our natural heritage. We believe that our prosperity grows when it is shared. This is a sharing of choice, not coincidence. In his writings, Goethe borrowed a word from the chemists of his day: Wahlverwandtschaft — the elective affinity of different elements that combine because of their inherent attraction. Canada and Europe are not bound by geography, even though we do share a 3,000 km border in the Arctic. We are bound by an affinity — elective, chosen, and renewed, and stronger for being so. Today, our societies are being shaken by new storms: the upheavals linked to climate change, the erosion of democratic norms, the use of trade as a weapon. The multilateral institutions we relied on have been weakened. Sovereignty and openness are difficult to reconcile today. Economic integration is now being weaponised, and tariffs used as a means of pressure. Financial mechanisms are being used for coercion. Supply chains are weak points to be exploited. Technology is transforming the nature of war, the structure of economies, and states' capacity to govern. Tech platforms aspire to sovereignty. They want to set the terms of access. They want to dictate the rules on regulation, and even bypass them. They want to control our data, spread disinformation, steal our children's childhood. This is a ferocious storm. A single tree will come down in it. A forest will not. That's because beneath the forest floor, the roots of an oak intertwine with those of its neighbours, exchanging nutrients, adding strength to strength, creating a resilient, self-sustaining ecosystem. Together, Canada and the European Union can anchor our ground to hold our values while forming a protective canopy under which our citizens can thrive. This is about sovereignty. Our ability to live as we wish. It is about the freedoms we must fight for, every day. Sovereignty requires resilience — the ability to withstand shocks. Sovereignty goes beyond being able to feed, fuel and defend ourselves. It now requires secure access to AI, semiconductors, critical minerals, payment systems, clean energy technologies, vaccines and space-based communications. We all have important gaps in these strategic capabilities, and we each rely on individual nations or companies to fill them. This creates vulnerabilities, particularly when supposedly 'global' companies prove national in the breach. Closing these gaps is not possible alone, but it is very achievable collectively. Europe and Canada are each strong. Europe and Canada are even stronger together. The institutions we have inherited are organised by geography. The strategic capabilities we need are organised by function. We can ally by function, if we are bold and deliberate. We should not be cowed by the perceived scale of the task. Just as dominance is the arrogance of the hegemon, perfection is the enemy of the good. The economics are clear: the leverage of the powerful in an exploitive relationship collapses well before complete independence is achieved. Diversity confers advantage. The objective is not self-sufficiency. It is collective resilience. This mutual advantage is at the core of the case for a deeper partnership between Canada and Europe. Europe brings market power. Research depth. Advanced manufacturing. The ability to set standards that the world frequently adopts. A defence industrial base being rebuilt at speed. Canada brings energy at huge scale and in every form the transition requires. One of the world's largest endowments of critical minerals. Deep capabilities in space, AI and quantum. Among the strongest banking systems in the world, and the most expert pension capital. Unique Arctic geography, and privileged access to both Atlantic and Pacific networks. Where our strengths differ, they complement. Where they overlap, they create scale. We should build on each other's strengths — deliberately, systematically, and rapidly. We have already begun with CETA, one of the world's most successful trade agreements. We are developing our Strategic Partnership Agreement. And we have begun taking advantage of Canada's role as the first non-European member of SAFE. But the ecosystem we have built is not yet equal to the ferocity of the changing climate. Nor is it moving fast enough to match the speed of the upheaval. Yesterday, President von der Leyen spoke of moving beyond CETA to an Alliance for the Future — opening the door to Canada becoming the European Union's first associate member. We welcome this ambition — polling shows an overwhelming majority of Canadians support much closer ties. An alliance for the future is a unique, positive approach that we will define together, building on our common strengths and based on shared values. So let me say plainly what Canada proposes. Canada and Europe should secure our strategic autonomy through deep cooperation in the full range of strategic capabilities, including critical minerals, defence industrial capacity, AI and compute, energy security, space, and payments. We should move towards seamless, digital trade in non-agricultural goods and a wide range of services. We should deepen our people-to-people ties, allowing our youth to live, work and study where they want on either side of the Atlantic. Canadian membership of Erasmus+ can give your students and ours more opportunity to learn at some of the world's top universities, to broaden their horizons, and to build lasting ties that will sustain our alliance for the future. Canadian membership of the next generation of Horizon would allow us to pool resources, cooperate on frontier technologies, and leverage our world-class research institutes and universities. Yesterday, President von der Leyen announced a "new European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials" to obtain and stockpile "the material needed for electric cars, chips, and batteries, clean tech, and defence." Canada has deposits of over 34 critical minerals, and we are among the top producers of the ten most essential for the world's energy transition. Our alliance can help fill Europe's need for reliable supply, Canada's need for advanced processing capabilities, and our common objective to build complete value chains. Canada can contribute LNG and hydrogen at large scale to support Europe's energy security, including by developing and leveraging new port infrastructure in the High North and on our east coast. We, in turn, can benefit from your leadership in many clean energy technologies. We can pool new sovereign compute capacity and build more secure broadband connections between Europe and Asia via our common geography. Canada and Europe can join forces to develop AI safety protocols, coordinate common standards, and strengthen transparency, while developing applications so our governments and companies can serve our citizens better. Canada and Europe should also explore creating an integrated market for financial services to broaden choice and reduce costs for our citizens, and improve access to capital for our companies, while maintaining our world-leading financial resilience. The opportunities that can be created by an alliance for the future are, most fundamentally, the product of our common values, our compatible systems and our complementary strengths. Deepening and widening our relationship will strengthen our sovereignty, improve affordability, opportunity and security for Canadian and European citizens, while safeguarding our ability to live our lives as we choose. I want to be precise about what I am not proposing. I am not proposing a third bloc in order to become a great-power rival — only with better manners. We do not seek power to dominate others. On the contrary, we are pursuing resilience so that no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity, or undermine our freedoms, our democracies, our rule of law. Those motivations, combined with our latent hard power, mean we can help create the next just, stable and prosperous world order. A Canada-EU alliance would create a beacon for other democracies. An alliance not defined by what we oppose, but by what we are for: freedom, solidarity, prosperity, sustainability. An alliance that builds resilience for what it allows us to do for our citizens, and our citizens to do for themselves. An alliance strong enough that no one can dictate our choices. Open enough that others can join. Principled enough that our strength reinforces international law rather than replacing it. It is often said that Canada became a nation during the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Certainly, the thousands of Canadians who did not return from that battle sacrificed their lives for something much bigger than themselves. One who did come home stopped first to pick up some acorns. Today, the same Vimy oaks grow in Canada and in France, living proof that what we cultivate together can survive the darkest winter to thrive again. Let us now deepen these roots, widen this canopy, and grow a transatlantic forest under which our citizens can flourish as free people on free ground. Every day. Thank you.