Canada, the 28th EU Member, Not the 51st State

Trump offered statehood. Canada sent troops to Greenland with European allies instead.

The American president invited Canada to become the 51st state. Canada looked across the Atlantic instead.

That is the short version. The longer version involves a frozen rock, a defence budget worth €150 billion, and a legal clause nobody thought would ever apply to a country bordering Michigan.

Canada shares a 1.2-kilometer border with Europe. It runs through Hans Island in the Arctic, split between Canada and Denmark in 2022 to end a territorial dispute so polite it mostly involved leaving bottles of whisky and schnapps for the other side. That sliver of land, barely visible on a map, is now doing extraordinary structural work. It is the physical basis for the argument that Canada could become the 28th Member State of the European Union.

Sounds absurd. And then you look at what has actually happened in the last twelve months.

Canadian troops are on Greenland. Not under NATO command, because the country they are deterring is NATO’s founding member. Operation Arctic Endurance, launched in January 2026, is a Danish-led coalition with German, French, Swedish, and Dutch forces deployed to push back against Washington’s threats to annex the territory. Canada joined. That decision, quiet as it was, broke something fundamental in the architecture of North American security.

Ottawa chose Copenhagen over Washington. Not metaphorically. Operationally.

The institutional trail leading here is longer than most people realize. CETA, the trade agreement in force since 2017, boosted bilateral trade and killed most tariffs. Fine. But CETA was built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. In June 2025, Brussels and Ottawa launched a new Strategic Partnership of the Future and started negotiating a Digital Trade Agreement to align Canadian rules on AI, cybersecurity, and digital identity with the EU’s regulatory stack.

By December, Canada became the only non-European country with preferential access to the EU’s €150 billion SAFE defence procurement instrument. Canadian defence firms got waivers from European origin requirements. They can bid on EU contracts, plug into European supply chains, and sit in on the committees designing the European Defence Union.

Meanwhile, Canada’s own military has quietly modeled how it would respond to an American invasion. The Globe and Mail reported that defence planners studied tactics similar to those used in Afghanistan. Officials stressed the scenario remains highly unlikely. But the fact that it was modeled at all tells you something about where the threat calculus has shifted.

The legal objection writes itself: Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union says any European State may apply. Canada is not in Europe. Except the EU has never cleanly defined where Europe ends. Cyprus joined in 2004 and it sits geographically in West Asia. Morocco got rejected in 1987, but that only proved that purely non-European states are out. It did not draw a border.

The EU reads its own treaties teleologically, which is a fancy way of saying it interprets them based on what they’re for, not what they literally say.

A growing bloc of legal scholars want to redefine European State around Article 2 values: democracy, rule of law, human rights. Canada outscores Italy, Greece, and Romania on corruption and rule of law metrics by wide margins. If the test is values, Canada passes it more convincingly than several countries already inside the club. And if interpretation isn’t enough, Article 48 allows treaty amendment. Chancellor Merz’s whole brand is Effectiveness before Unity. He has already bulldozed through the Mercosur deal and Ukraine funding over objections. A limited treaty revision framed as a security imperative is not outside the range of things Berlin would champion.

The EU’s Green Deal and EV transition are hostage to critical minerals controlled by China. Canada is the only G7 country with the geological reserves to break that dependency. Bringing those resources inside the Single Market solves Europe’s most dangerous industrial vulnerability. In exchange, Canada gets the diversification it has chased for half a century. It would enter as a net contributor, not a charity case.

None of this matters if Canadians don’t want it.

But apparently they do. An Abacus Data poll from March 2025 found 46% support joining the EU. Only 29% opposed. That is more enthusiasm than the UK shows for rejoining. And when Canadians were asked about becoming the 51st American state, support sat at a flat 10%. Better the 28th EU country than the 51st American state, as Le Monde put it. Canadians now rank the EU as their most important partner for the next few years, ahead of both Britain and the United States. That is not about one president. It is a population realizing that its instincts on healthcare, climate, and multilateralism map onto Brussels, not Washington.

The trigger, the thing that turned a thought experiment into a live policy question, is the Greenland Crisis. When the Trump administration slapped tariffs on Denmark and seven other European nations to force a territorial concession, the subtext for Canada was not complicated. The logic that treats Greenland as a strategic asset applies identically to the Canadian Arctic. If Danish sovereignty can be brushed aside, Canadian sovereignty has no structural floor.

Macron said it plainly to his ambassadors in January: the 51st state rhetoric is what happens when great powers sacrifice allies for the law of the strongest. Mark Carney named it at Davos the same month, calling the old relationship with the United States over and describing Canada as the most European of non-European countries.

Berlin is on board. Merz called Canada a force multiplier at Hannover Messe. Paris sees a Francophone democracy that validates the European social model. Even the populist right, normally allergic to enlargement, struggles to object. Canada is wealthy, Western, and culturally familiar. It does not trigger the migration or cost anxieties that block Ukrainian or Turkish bids.

The improbable and the impossible are not the same thing. The EU bends its own rules when survival demands it. What makes Canada different from every previous enlargement debate is the symmetry: both sides need the other for exactly the same reason. To stay sovereign in a world where the old guarantor of sovereignty has started behaving like a predator.

---

References:

View from Europe: The Increasingly Convincing Case for Canada Joining the EU