By Daniel Béland

June 29, 2025

On June 23rd, during the Canada-European Union Summit in Brussels where he signed a new Security and Defence Partnership, Prime Minister Mark Carney uttered a phrase that he and Liberal cabinet minister Mélanie Joly had used before: Canada, Carney said, is “the most European of non-European countries”.

Although some commentators agreed with the Prime Minister’s claim, others reacted negatively, arguing, among other things, that Canada has much more in common with the United States than with European countries.

Prime Minister Carney’s claim that Canada is “the most European of non-European countries” is not a rigorous social scientific argument that should be assessed empirically but a key rhetorical element of a broader political discourse and foreign policy strategy.

Considering this, we have to place this phrase in the broader context of Carney’s June 23rd statement. In it, he stated that “Canada looks first to the European Union to build a better world”. He also emphasized the need for Canada to work with “like-minded partners” while fostering a “rules-based international order” based on shared values, interests, and trust.

In his speech, Carney did not criticize or even mention US President Donald Trump and yet some of his statements about what Canada and Europe have in common today can be understood as an implicit rebuttal of the current occupant of the White House. This is where the phrase “the most European of non-European countries,” which is sociologically and historically debatable, makes sense politically.

What the Carney government is trying to do here is implicitly emphasize the larger-than-ever diplomatic continental divide between Canada and the United States by stressing our similarities with European countries, which themselves are different from each other notwithstanding the institutional structure provided by the European Union.

Carney’s claim that Canada is ‘the most European of non-European countries’ is not a rigorous social scientific argument that should be assessed empirically but a key rhetorical element of a broader political discourse and foreign policy strategy.

Just as the EU is a political project that seeks to bring together countries that can be quite different from one another (e.g., Estonia and Portugal are culturally dissimilar to say the least), Canada can forge a much stronger alliance with both the European Union and specific European countries without negating its reality as a highly diverse North American country that seeks to assert itself vis-à-vis its powerful and currently politically unfriendly neighbor.

It is hard to assess empirically whether Canada is “the Most European of Non-European countries” (a short visit to Argentina might convince one that Argentina is another strong contender among several other cases) but, in the end, we can recognize that making us closer to the European Union and its members is a legitimate and necessary project, regardless of whether we fully embrace Prime Minister Carney’s rhetoric about our European-ness.

More generally, we can both recognize key differences between our country and our European partners while stressing the importance of increasing our diplomatic, economic, and security ties with them. However, this type of complex argument is probably at odds with the expediencies of political rhetoric.

In this context, we should understand the Prime Minister’s statement that Canada is “the most European of non-European countries” as an aspirational claim about the need for our country to become closer to Europe diplomatically, economically, and militarily rather than as a rigorous historical and sociological statement about what Canada is.

Definitively answering the question of Canada’s European-ness relative to that of other countries would require extensive qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis. This is not a particularly interesting question from a social scientific standpoint, and because the answer would vary according to the factors we would emphasize in this comparative research.

Better to recognize the distinct nature of political rhetoric and think about whether it is effective in helping Canada to strengthen its relationship with the European Union, which is by far the most crucial thing at stake here, from a policy standpoint.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.