Canada’s Carney pitches win-win tech pact to Europe

Secondly, a lot of the concerns that I've had and a lot of other people have had in the last couple of decades have really been borne out in the last few years.

We're really seeing the impact now of technology's interference with privacy, things like surveillance, algorithmic decisions, all that stuff.

But also, technology is becoming much more central to geopolitics and the decisions that countries have to make, particularly since the second Trump administration began at the beginning of last year.

And we can really see that in evidence in Mark Carney's historic, I think, speech in the European Parliament yesterday.

To put this into context, the Canadian Prime Minister has recently been trying to whip up some kind of middle powers alliance to counteract the threat from down south in the US.

And he seems to have found a willing ear in Europe, or at least with the European Commission, which is the executive body of the EU.

And European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gave her annual State of the Union address in the European Parliament on Wednesday, with Carney in attendance, which was in itself very unusual.

But then she blindsided everybody, including the EU's national leaders, by offering to work with Carney on, quote, opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU.

Now, associate member of the EU is not a thing.

It's not described in the EU treaties.

So everybody was a bit, whoa.

Carney then followed yesterday with his own speech to the European Parliament.

And he did acknowledge that she said associate member, and he said Canada welcomes this.

He said that the polling in Canada is very strong for much deeper ties between Canada and Europe.

But he then went on to describe what he called an alliance for the future.

And even if we're not talking about Canada becoming some kind of semi-member of the EU, what he described was a very deep alliance.

He talked about creating an integrated market for financial services.

He talked about making it easier for Canadian students to go to European universities and vice versa.

And he even mentioned the idea that Canada might be able to join Horizon, which is the EU's big and very expensive program for funding research and development.

But the core of his argument was really about sovereignty, the ability of a country or a bloc to make its own rules, make its own decisions about how things should work there.

Obviously, the Trump administration has been massively challenging the sovereignty of both Canada and the European Union recently.

Part of that has been bluntly territorial, such as the threat to make Canada the 51st state of the US, or threatening to invade and take over Greenland, which is, of course, a territory of Denmark, an EU member.

The U.S. has been messing with Canadian European sovereignty in other ways, too.

For example, in the recent trade negotiations between Canada and the U.S., which collapsed in part because the White House tried to force Canada to drop its beloved language rules.

Or in the Trump administration regularly telling Europe that it's got to water down its beloved tech rules and stop being so mean to American big tech.