Prime Minister Mark Carney is back in Ottawa and apparently ready to resume his government's Parliamentary responsibilities and get on with the business of looking after some of Canada's internal political and economic issues. The short list includes growing deficits and debt, health-care bottlenecks, rising consumer costs, taxation, climate commitments, trade war impacts, Indigenous relations, pipelines to the coasts, and major mining projects.Canadians can only hope that attempts to deal with these issues are a little more o...
Prime Minister Mark Carney is back in Ottawa and apparently ready to resume his government's Parliamentary responsibilities and get on with the business of looking after some of Canada's internal political and economic issues. The short list includes growing deficits and debt, health-care bottlenecks, rising consumer costs, taxation, climate commitments, trade war impacts, Indigenous relations, pipelines to the coasts, and major mining projects.
Canadians can only hope that attempts to deal with these issues are a little more obviously effective than the long trail of uncertainty the prime minister has left behind following his numerous excursions abroad. The larger uncertainties include the Canada-U.S. trade relationship, the new plan to become an associate member of the EU, and the foreign investment booster summit that has yet to produce results.
Beyond those big national economic questions are many uncertainties, confusions and contradictions surrounding such topics as Arctic defence, China, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, Belarus and Mexico.
On Sunday, Carney met Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in Ottawa to promote greater economic ties and announce plans to deepen collaboration in the Arctic and across defence, critical minerals, energy, science and emerging technologies. The joint Canada/Norway Arctic defence strategy, an objective proposed in previous years, was given new publicity just after U.S. President Donald Trump announced last Friday that the U.S. had reached an Arctic defence agreement with Denmark and its subsidiary territory, Greenland.
Greenland, of course, had been declared a takeover target by Trump, just as he has verbally threatened to annex Canada. Now that he has succeeded in acquiring rights for military operations in Greenland, does this change the outlook for Canada's role in the Arctic?
Canada has a new Arctic deal with Norway, and the U.S. has a deal with Denmark/Greenland. At the same time, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said that Arctic defence would be a "flagship joint project" if Canada were to become an associate member of the EU.
But will Canada become an associate EU member?
Denmark has said that under the United States-Greenland deal, Arctic security would fall under NATO oversight, where Denmark is also believed to be among European nations that lack enthusiasm for making Canada an "associate member" of the EU. Others, including Germany, do not support the associate member label.
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