Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sat in the front row of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Wednesday as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her annual address to propose that Canada be admitted as an “associate member” of the European Union. Carney returned the next day to deliver a speech of his own. For J.B. Shurk, writing at American Thinker, the two-day spectacle was less a diplomatic breakthrough than a “nauseating bouquet of arrogance, foolishness, incompetence, and stale entitlement.”
Shurk’s op-ed, published September 19, 2026, argues that the proposed Canada-EU alignment represents a fateful choice by a prime minister who never won the office through ordinary democratic means and who is now steering Canada away from its most important economic partner, the United States, and toward a European bloc he describes as “already sinking to the ocean floor.”
A Pair of ‘Elites’ Selling Democracy
The article opens by questioning the democratic credentials of both leaders. Von der Leyen, whom Shurk sarcastically labels “Queen Ursula,” was never directly elected by European citizens, he notes, yet speaks as if she governs a single people — regularly invoking “our values” when describing a continent of distinct nations, dissimilar cultures, and more than two hundred native languages. Carney, a former head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, was installed in Canada’s highest political office “last year” by what Shurk calls his “globalist cronies.”
“They are ‘elites’ chosen by ‘elites’ to represent the interests of ‘elites,'” Shurk writes, arguing that both leaders prattle about democracy while owing their positions to something other than a direct popular mandate.
The Eight-Decade Subsidy Nobody Talks About
The op-ed’s central economic claim is that since the Second World War, the United States has heavily subsidized the economies of both Canada and Europe — providing for the West’s collective security while permitting one-way tariffs against American producers. That arrangement, born of post-war desperation and Cold War fear, has outlived its usefulness by decades, according to Shurk.
He contends that because this history is not honestly taught in schools, Europeans and Canadians grow up believing their economies succeed despite the United States rather than because of it. When President Trump began insisting on fair and reciprocal trade terms, Shurk writes, European and Canadian elites screamed about “Trump’s trade war” as if it were a surprise attack, never explaining to their citizens how their nations had benefited for eight decades by tariffing U.S. products while selling their own goods freely to American consumers. He cites this as a prime example of the “misinformation” that governments regularly disseminate — and a key reason they cannot be trusted to police so-called “disinformation.”
Brexit ‘Cancelled,’ Ukraine Enveloped
Beyond trade, Shurk argues, von der Leyen and Carney spoke of an expanding security and economic alliance that would reintegrate the United Kingdom into Europe’s bureaucratic ranks and envelop Ukraine with military and financial support — all paid for by Canadian and European taxpayers. In his telling, the British people’s 2016 vote for Brexit has been “sabotaged and nullified by government fiat.” He also repeats the charge that the European and American establishments orchestrated a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s last government opposed to EU integration. “This is how the Canadians and Europeans do ‘democracy,'” he writes, listing sabotage, censorship, government propaganda, the installation of unelected elites, blacklisting of political parties, criminalization of speech, election nullification, and NGO-sponsored coups — before adding that Democrats and Establishment Republicans in the United States do democracy the same way.
An Armada That Can’t Stay Afloat
Shurk then pivots to capability. Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Ukraine, he writes, are “dilapidated vessels drifting in an open sea with huge and growing ruptures in their hulls,” taking on more water than they can bail out while pretending to be part of a glorious armada.
Without U.S. military assets and personnel providing the backbone for NORAD and NATO, he argues, Canada, the U.K., and the EU would have but one defense posture: “to lie down and play dead.” He notes that Canada struggles even to fight forest fires. The U.K., he says, lacks sufficient seaworthy naval vessels to secure its own islands, let alone back its territorial claims to the Falkland Islands with military strength. Most EU nations depend on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for deterrence — which makes it “all the more preposterous,” in his view, when Denmark and France huff about keeping Greenland in Europe, or when Spain and Italy refuse to let U.S. military aircraft refuel before engaging Iran. Ukraine, meanwhile, remains “an albatross of corruption,” he writes, with one high-ranking official after another fleeing the war-torn country carrying suitcases of jewelry and cash. “If Canada, the U.K., the E.U., and Ukraine were warhorses, they’d all be sent to the glue factory.”
The Sweet Talk and the Sellout
The op-ed quotes von der Leyen’s direct appeal to Carney from the parliament floor: “Dear Mark, I said we must urgently reimagine our partnerships….We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well.” Shurk describes Carney smiling “from ear to ear” at the thought of casting off Canada’s New World trailblazing and shackling Canadians’ futures to Old Europe.
He also takes aim at Canada’s state-controlled news media, which he says are enamored of Carney, his love affair with Europe, and his war of words with Trump. Canadian journalists still describe Carney’s “middle powers” speech at Davos last January as “historic” and a “worldwide viral moment,” Shurk writes, while most Americans never stopped laughing at his pretend “tough guy” persona. Now, he claims, the press is desperate to paint Carney as the natural “leader of the free world.”
As evidence of contradiction, Shurk points out that the same leader who insists “Canada is not for sale” has decided to sell control over his country’s airports — most likely to communist China, in his estimation — for extra cash while the economy shrivels. He accuses Carney of bowing to King Charles III, to “Queen Ursula,” and to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, concluding that Carney apparently wants to “preserve” Canadian sovereignty by becoming a vassal state of China and the European Commission.
What Canada Gets
Shurk’s closing inventory of the deal’s supposed benefits for ordinary Canadians is grim: additional green-energy regulations, a slower economy, more inflation, more businesses closing and relocating to the United States, more tax dollars sent to Ukraine so that some of the world’s most corrupt officials can keep buying luxury cars and vacation homes — and possibly Canadian children sent to fight a European war against Russia.
“Bon voyage and bonne chance, Canada!” he writes. “You’re going to need it.”
The piece reflects a strain of American conservative opinion that views the Canada-EU associate-membership proposal less as a trade story than as a cultural and geopolitical realignment — one in which Ottawa trades a continental partnership with Washington for a seat on a European vessel that, in Shurk’s telling, is taking on water faster than anyone aboard will admit.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/carney-marries-canada-to-dying-europe/