{"id":586722,"date":"2026-04-06T22:18:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T22:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/586722\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T22:18:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T22:18:13","slug":"majority-of-canadians-open-to-joining-eu-new-poll-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/586722\/","title":{"rendered":"Majority of Canadians open to joining EU, new poll suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Mark Carney takes part in a news conference during the Canada-EU Summit in Brussels, Belgium in June, 2025.Sean Kilpatrick\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

New polling suggests a majority of Canadians think Canada should explore joining the European Union at a fraught time for geopolitical relations.<\/p>\n

A survey of 4,000 people conducted by Spark Advocacy\u2019s polling arm in March found that one in four respondents thought it would be a good idea for Canada to formally join the economic and political bloc of European nations.<\/p>\n

A further 58 per cent indicated it was a proposal worth considering further, while the remainder said it was a bad idea.<\/p>\n

The Spark poll cannot be assigned a margin of error because it was conducted online.<\/p>\n

Spark\u2019s chief strategy officer Bruce Anderson said the survey suggests Canadians are increasingly open to finding ways to buck Canada\u2019s reliance on the United States after more than a year of tariffs under U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s second administration.<\/p>\n

EU and Australia sign free trade pact and announce a new defense partnership<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen is obviously a real shock to Canadians\u2019 sense of the status quo and whether or not it could endure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd alongside that, a real openness on the part of Canadians to say, \u2019Well, let\u2019s find solutions to this problem of reliance on the U.S. when the U.S. isn\u2019t as reliable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prospect of Canada joining the European bloc \u2013 despite the obvious geographical barriers \u2013 has come up recently on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the Europe 2026 conference in Berlin in March, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the European Union is attracting more candidate countries, such as Iceland, and suggested \u201cmaybe Canada at some point\u201d will sign up.<\/p>\n

Barrot smiled while mentioning Canada and his comments generated some laughter from a panel moderator and applause from the audience.<\/p>\n

The European Parliament adopted a report last month calling on the EU to deepen ties with Canada. Members said in an accompanying statement that Canada is \u201cperhaps the most European country outside Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

That mimics a statement made by Prime Minister Mark Carney on his first trip to Europe after taking office in March 2025, on a trip designed in part to send a message about his pledge to expand Canada\u2019s ties away from the U.S.<\/p>\n

The idea of Canada joining the EU has been floated by some in Canada, including Alberta politician Thomas Lukaszuk, while others reject the idea of adding a layer of Brussels bureaucracy to existing federal and provincial rules.<\/p>\n

Carney dismissed the idea last June, saying he wants clearer and broader ties with the continent but not as a member of the EU.<\/p>\n

Support for exploring EU membership crossed party lines in Spark\u2019s survey. At 33 per cent opposed, supporters of the federal Conservative party were the ones most likely to see it as a bad idea.<\/p>\n

The survey also asked Canadians whether they thought the United Kingdom made a mistake leaving the EU in 2020. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said Brexit was a bad call.<\/p>\n

Anderson said Canadians are more attentive to global developments since Trump started levying his tariffs last year. He said Carney\u2019s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year \u2013 where he called on \u201cmiddle powers\u201d to band together \u2013 registered with the broader population.<\/p>\n

Canadians are increasingly \u201cpragmatic\u201d about global affairs, Anderson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not saying everybody\u2019s sitting around the dining room table at night talking about it, but there was an idea there that immediately made sense to a lot of Canadians, which is that, if you rely too much on superpowers, you might not end up having as much leverage as you need to have when the going gets tough,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Anderson, a longtime pollster, was a public supporter of Carney during last year\u2019s Liberal leadership campaign and subsequent federal election.<\/p>\n

Anderson said Carney is well-suited for this moment in geopolitics, given his experience on the global stage before taking the reins of the Liberal party.<\/p>\n

But he added that no matter who was prime minister right now, Canadians would be looking for solutions beyond capitulating to Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis whole subject area is more at the heart of our politics than it has been, well, probably in my lifetime, to be honest \u2013 this whole idea of, how will we structure our economy for the future?\u201d Anderson said.<\/p>\n

The polling industry\u2019s professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Prime Minister Mark Carney takes part in a news conference during the Canada-EU…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[901,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,44,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":{"0":"post-586722","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-breaking-news-video","13":"tag-british-columbia","14":"tag-ca","15":"tag-canada","16":"tag-canada-news","17":"tag-canada-sports","18":"tag-canada-sports-news","19":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","20":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","21":"tag-canadian-news","22":"tag-economy","23":"tag-education","24":"tag-environment","25":"tag-federal-government","26":"tag-foreign-news","27":"tag-globe-and-mail","28":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","29":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","30":"tag-government","31":"tag-life-news","32":"tag-lifestyle","33":"tag-local-news","34":"tag-manitoba","35":"tag-national-news","36":"tag-new-brunswick","37":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","38":"tag-news","39":"tag-northwest-territories","40":"tag-nova-scotia","41":"tag-nunavut","42":"tag-ontario","43":"tag-pei","44":"tag-photos","45":"tag-political-news","46":"tag-political-opinion","47":"tag-politics","48":"tag-politics-news","49":"tag-quebec","50":"tag-sports-news","51":"tag-technology","52":"tag-travel","53":"tag-trudeau","54":"tag-us-news","55":"tag-world-news","56":"tag-yukon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}