By Anil Wasif

October 29, 2026

In August, 2023, Lucie Cézar moved to Lévis, Quebec, from France with her partner and their two children. A caregiver across the Atlantic, Cézar spent two years retraining as a nursing assistant and graduated in February 2026. She passed her certification exams and took evening shifts at a long-term care centre in Saint-Apollinaire.

In late July, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada refused her post-graduation work permit, and she had to stop working. The file, Le Soleil reported, lacked a French test result. Ms. Cézar is French, and Quebec, as La Presse noted, is short of nursing assistants. “So we stay here,” she told the paper in August, “and we wait.”

In Montreal today, Mark Carney is hosting senior European Union officials — including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa — for the most important Canada-EU Summit in memory.

The summit is meant to settle what the “Alliance for the Future” (as Carney calls the transatlantic squeeze), based on Canada’s associate membership in the bloc, will do.

In Strasbourg in September, Carney proposed letting young people live, work and study where they want on either side of the Atlantic. A draft communiqué seen by The Globe and Mail commits to negotiations on Canada joining Erasmus+, and a senior Canadian official has said the talks include labour mobility. Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s ambassador to the EU, has ruled out free movement of labour in favour of “specialized areas.”

Any deal in those areas needs two approvals from two levels of government, as Ms. Cézar learned. Licensing belongs to the provinces and the orders and colleges they empower. Permission to work belongs to Ottawa. Settling one without the other leaves people licensed but unable to work, or allowed to work but unlicensed.

Canada has tried this before. On October 17, 2008, Stephen Harper received Nicolas Sarkozy and José Manuel Barroso at La Citadelle in Québec City for the Canada-EU summit that agreed to pursue what became CETA. The joint study before them had found support among respondents on both sides for cooperation on labour mobility and credentials.

Before the day was out, Premier Jean Charest and Sarkozy had signed the Quebec-France agreement on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications. Charest had pitched the transatlantic deal at Davos in 2007 and sold it partly as a way to fill jobs for labour-starved employers. Last month, he told the Globe that European countries “represent a great pool of talent from which we can recruit.”

That agreement now covers 81 professions, trades and functions. By 2024, France’s engineering accreditation body had counted 9,859 people trained in France or Quebec who had crossed the Atlantic to practise, including nearly 700 French-trained engineers in Quebec. The nurses’ order admitted 134 applicants from France on a temporary basis in 2024-25 alone. It works by recognizing qualifications rather than demanding diploma equivalence, a principle modelled on an EU directive.

CETA’s chapter on the subject obliges Canada and the EU only to encourage the relevant authorities to bring forward joint recommendations. Architects did, in May 2018, through their Canadian and European bodies. By March 2022, the talks had reached a ninth round, with provincial and territorial governments sitting in as observers on an agreement their own regulators would apply, and residency the last open issue.

It took effect on December 18, 2025, seven and a half years after they asked. Mark Camilleri observed in his Policy piece of February that no other field had followed, and the Globe‘s Mark Rendell confirmed it in September. The architects’ deal is the example Wilkinson cites.

The Canada-EU alliance is betting that Canadians and Europeans want to work on each other’s side of the Atlantic. Quebec’s experience says they do, when governments do their part.

A Lisbon architect who wants to move to Vancouver needs twelve years of education, training and practice, four of them on the job, plus EU citizenship or permanent residency. She also has to take a 10-hour course on Canadian practice, file through the Ordre des architectes du Québec in Montréal and register in British Columbia. Nine years into CETA, the trade pact covers one occupation, against Quebec’s 81.

Quebec did not get those numbers because regulators enjoy foreign applicants. It got them because a government that needed workers pushed its professional orders and kept pushing. The orders pushed back. The province’s complaints commissioner has examined grievances that the engineers’ and nurses’ orders added conditions the accord never contemplated, and French-trained doctors still complete a 12-week evaluative internship before they practise.

Sceptics will say Quebec and France are a special case. They share a language, a legal tradition and four centuries of history. The EU is 27 regulatory systems in 24 official languages, and governments with shortages of their own have little reason to back a scheme that sends nine professionals west for every one heading east.

The point is fair, but it is out of date. Brussels already runs a single system for its members, the model Quebec borrowed. On September 15th, the Commission proposed common standards for judging credentials earned outside the Union. Someone trained abroad now waits 14 months, on average, for an answer. The proposal would cut that to four. The EU’s new talent pool law also lists mutual recognition arrangements as a way to have qualifications accepted. Europe is now writing into its own law the obligations CETA left voluntary.

Canadian governments have made similar changes at home over the past year, though Rupak Chattopadhyay pointed out in Policy this summer that many credentials still stop at provincial borders. The Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act has been in force since January 1. Internal trade rules treat anyone certified in one province as qualified in the rest, so Ms. Cézar’s Quebec certification could, in principle, be accepted in Calgary. But without a work permit, she could not use it there either. British Columbia bars most Canadian-experience requirements across the 18 regulators its act covers.

In Ottawa, Budget 2025 set aside $97 million over five years for a Foreign Credential Recognition Action Fund, drawn from existing departmental resources.

The summit should build the same rules into the new alliance. Roland Paris of the University of Ottawa said this month that what the partnership is called matters less than how it functions. Carney and von der Leyen can start by naming the first professions to be covered: engineers, nurses and accountants.

The CETA committee should then have until the 2027 summit to settle terms for each, the date the draft sets for defining associate membership. Ottawa and the premiers can use part of the action fund to pay regulators to negotiate with their European counterparts the way Quebec did, assessing qualifications rather than matching diplomas.

Each new agreement also needs a matching work permit for the people it covers. The Globe‘s editorial board has told Canadians “fantasizing about moving to a chic apartment on the Seine” not to get too excited, since immigration sensitivities would keep any loosening of visa rules limited.

A permit available only to people a province has already approved is limited by definition. A European engineer registered in Halifax would arrive ready to start, and a nursing assistant certified in Quebec would not lose her shifts over a language document.

The Canada-EU alliance is betting that Canadians and Europeans want to work on each other’s side of the Atlantic. Quebec’s experience says they do, when governments do their part.

That means treating credential recognition as a government job rather than something left to regulators’ goodwill, and pairing every recognized credential with the federal permission to use it. With these two factors, Canada and EU can build a real transatlantic job market. Without them, it will keep producing cases like Ms. Cézar’s.

Policy Columnist Anil Wasif is a public servant in the Ontario government. He serves on the University of Toronto’s Governing Council and the Advisory Board of McGill’s Max Bell School. Internationally, he serves on the OECD’s Infrastructure Delivery Committee and the Board of Trustees at BacharLorai Global. The views expressed are his own.