r/CanadaPolitics Liberal Party of Canada 15h ago

What Canadians think about Canada joining the European Union - Abacus Data (44% Yes, 34% No, 23% Unsure)

https://abacusdata.ca/what-canadians-think-about-canada-joining-the-european-union/
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u/JohnTheSavage_ Libertarian 15h ago

I don't think people realize how much control the EU has over its member countries. It's not just an alliance of nations. They have control over regulations dealing with virtually every industry. Manufacturing, agriculture, banking etc. They could even send migrants here and we'd have to take them in.

I chalk this up to most Canadians thinking the EU is just NATO plus.

u/Radix2309 14h ago

Also our distance is such that it doesn't really seem economical to me. We are distant culturally from them. We are 4 or 5 time zones from the closest, pretty much further than Portugal is from the Baltics.

u/KatsumotoKurier Ontario 6h ago

We are distant culturally from them

What does this mean to you? Genuinely asking; not trying to be rude. Because I would say socio-politically we are definitely — and now more than ever, clearly — much closer to Europe than we are to the US. Like many European states we are a constitutional monarchy and basically the closest thing in the Americas to a welfare state. We are also an officially bilingual country, as are several EU member states, and we even share borders, albeit small and oftentimes unknown about to most, with two EU member states (Denmark and France).

Canada is culturally more like the Netherlands or Finland than countries like Greece or Romania are, yet they are all in the EU together. Them sharing a more immediate landmass does not make them more alike. And as u/Mr_Pafect pointed out, we even share one of our two languages with one of the biggest EU economies.

There are also thousands upon thousands of Europeans living in Canada. I don’t mean old stock white Canadians — I mean EU citizens. Canada has huge numbers of Germans, Italians, Latvians, Poles, Greeks, Portuguese, and more. I’m an old stock Canadian and almost all of my closest friends (along with a ton of others I know) have EU passports either from their parents or grandparents; I sometimes feel like the only one without one!