Canada should abandon the idea of joining the European Union and instead negotiate a comprehensive new economic relationship with the United States, former U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland argues in a new opinion piece. Sondland contends that the two countries have spent months behaving like a couple in a bad marriage, each convinced the other is taking advantage, while ignoring the enormous stakes if the relationship breaks down.
At the center of his argument is a blunt assessment of Canada's options. Diversification of trade is sensible for a country that sends the overwhelming majority of its goods exports to a single market, and Europe, Britain, Japan, and India all have roles to play. But diversification is not substitution, Sondland writes. Canada will not replace North America with Europe, and the fashionable idea that it should join the European Union is the clearest example of mistaking a political gesture for an economic plan.
As a legal matter, Sondland notes, EU membership is available to European states, and Canada is not one. Even if Brussels rewrote its treaties, he argues full membership would be a terrible bargain. Canada would trade its own commercial policy for the EU's common external tariff and regulatory system, risking a customs and regulatory border with its largest customer, most important supplier, and closest industrial partner. Canadian businesses would be subject to rules made thousands of miles away while the factories, pipelines, farms, mines, and research centers that sustain the economy remain tied by roads, rails, grids, and pipelines to the United States. That is not sovereignty, he writes. It is outsourcing sovereignty.
Instead, Sondland proposes a deeper North American relationship that preserves Canadian political independence while recognizing that the two countries already make things together. He points to the automobile sector as the clearest example. A car assembled in Ontario or Michigan is not meaningfully Canadian or American in the old-fashioned sense, with parts crossing the border several times before final assembly and engineers, tooling companies, battery suppliers, semiconductor firms, steel producers, and logistics operators working on both sides.
The sensible goal, he argues, is not to force Canadian manufacturing to become an appendage of American manufacturing, nor to let either country subsidize factories that merely displace the other's workers. It is to create a common North American manufacturing zone in which both countries benefit from production, investment, and innovation. That would require common rules of origin with real North American content, common standards for electric vehicles, batteries, and charging, mutually recognized safety and environmental rules, and incentive programs designed to reward continental production rather than trigger subsidy wars.
Sondland applies the same principle to energy. The United States and Canada, he writes, should be the world's most reliable combined supplier of oil, natural gas, electricity, uranium, critical minerals, and next-generation energy technology. Canada has the resources; the United States has immense capital markets, demand, technology, and security capacity. Rather than squabble over tariffs and permits, the two countries should create a North American energy-security compact featuring shared infrastructure planning, accelerated cross-border approvals, joint critical-mineral processing, integrated grids, and long-term commitments to supply one another in a crisis.
Banking is another obvious place for a serious bargain, according to Sondland, who describes Canada as having a stable banking system. He lists banking, dairy, procurement, digital rules, industrial subsidies, and autos as areas that belong on the table. But he insists they should be resolved through reciprocity, not coercion, and criticizes Washington for too often treating tariffs and public humiliation as a negotiating strategy while Ottawa has increasingly treated diversification away from the United States as a strategic end in itself. Both instincts, he writes, are emotionally satisfying but neither is a strategy.
Sondland also sets out a first principle he says must be plain: Canada is a sovereign country, not the 51st state, and no good can come from language that treats it as one. America does not need a submissive Canada, he writes. It needs a prosperous, capable, secure, and willing partner on its northern border, one that shares a continent, a NATO commitment, a vast energy system, critical supply chains, and values far more alike than different.
His second principle is equally plain: sovereignty is not a license for permanent economic asymmetry. If Canada wishes to preserve privileged access to the American market, and it should, then it must be willing to address barriers that American businesses and workers reasonably see as one-sided. The current approach, he concludes, has it backward. Canada should return to the table, and so should the United States, not to negotiate another small, defensive tariff truce but to construct a new North American economic relationship worthy of the two most integrated economies in the democratic world.