What the Americans have created with the situation around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz got me thinking about what tools Canada actually has in this trade war. The St Lawrence River is a hugely important trade route. It handles around $50Bn worth of trade and enormous amounts of cargo every year, through to the Great Lakes and out to the Atlantic Ocean.

Canada controls this infrastructure. So why not use it? Canada could introduce a tariff or transit charge on American goods moving through Canadian ports such as Montreal and through the Welland Canal. If America is going to put tariffs on Canadian goods, Canada could apply a similar cost to American trade using Canadian infrastructure.

Just saying.

“Canada is looking to expand its trade links with Britain as its latest trade war with the US pushes it to other allies and wean itself off its southern neighbour.

Sources familiar with the situation told The Mail on Sunday that Mark Carney’s government was warming to a ‘CANZUK’ alliance, including Australia, New Zealand and the UK, after trade talks with the US collapsed abruptly last week sparking a new round of tit-for-tat tariffs.

I think if you asked anyone in the government, they would all say they are very supportive of this CANZUK idea,’ one source said, adding the UK and Canada had a ‘historic opportunity’ to bolster trade ties, saying both had become ‘estranged’ from their largest trading partners, the US and EU respectively. 

While the change of Prime Minister and cabinet reshuffle had made trade discussions ‘difficult’, Canadian diplomatic sources were upbeat, saying: ‘Burnham’s government is relatively new and finding its feet, but in preliminary discussions we’re sensing a real openness and desire to move on that.’ 

Britain is Canada’s third-largest trading partner but talks to ramp up that cooperation have taken on fresh urgency after Donald Trump announced a fresh wave of tariffs on the country after a previous spate of levies last year.

The President said last week the US would slap tariffs on Canadian vehicles and auto parts from the start of next year, accusing the country of ‘ripping off’ America. 

Ottawa swiftly replied it would be slapping retaliatory levies on £15billion of US imports.

The spat has increased support for a CANZUK alliance to provide a counterweight to the economic dominance of America, as well as China and the EU. 

In March this year Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and the leader of the Canadian Conservative Party Pierre Poilievre endorsed the proposal.”

Full article here.

As an Australian I would like greater mobility and would like to benefit from Canada and UK's job markets, but I don't want Australia to get flooded with low skill immigrants, who'll enjoy Australia's superior wages/conditions for low skill employees.

I think the solution to this is CANZUK citizenship being seperate to Australia, British, Canadian and Kiwi citizenship. The governments of Australia, UK, Canada and NZ each get ~40000 seats per year, to give to any citizen of any CANZUK country.

Applicants send their application to the country which they want to migrate too, or can send applications to their own country. Most CANZUK citizenship are given for merit, but there are other paths.

1. CANZUK citizenship cannot be passed down to children
2. CANZUK citizenship is given to any spouse when the status is gained, but can't be given afterwards
3. CANZUK citizenship is considered equal to PR/ILR
4. CANZUK citizenship is for life and usually doesn't expire.
5. CANZUK citizenship can be revoked by any CANZUK country for any reason
6. CANZUK citizens can choose to naturalize
7. Children of CANZUK citizenships born in another country get both their parents citizenship, and the citizenship of whatever country they're in.
8. CANZUK citizens get an entry card which can be used to enter a CANZUK country without a passport.

There was multiple reasons that French became a subject of debate on the trade talk table. I'm sure some of the reasons you're probably already aware of. I'm going to bring up two reasons that I think that it was brought up because no one is talking about these two reasons. To be clear these are not the only reasons that it was brought up, but these are important reasons I think need to be acknowledged for Canzuk to be successful.

1. I think because a lot of racist rhetoric is used down south where they pin different races against each other, it is inconvenient to the people who are trying to create race wars for there to be two different and distinct white cultures in the north that don't always get along.

Essentially what these people are trying to say, is that race is the defining factor when it comes to culture and the race is the defining factor when it comes to violence. So, having two white cultures in the north is inconvenient. It essentially disproves that race is a defining factor of culture. Additionally, not only are there two distinct and different white cultures, these two white cultures don't always get along with one another. So you can't say, that it is normal for people to fight over races because we fight the other white people.

They want their racism to be normal and so they're destroying evidence that it isn't normal.

1. Historically Alberta has hated Quebec and vice versa. I think by putting French on the table during the trade negotiations, they knew that what they were asking for was unreasonable. They knew that we would never say yes to that. So I think that the reason they asked for it was because then they can look at Alberta and say look they chose Quebec over you, doesn't that make you want to leave Canada? And the reason they want Alberta to leave Canada is because then they don't have to offer them minimum mandatory maternity leave or minimum vacation time. They are trying to divide Alberta away from Canada in any way they can.

I'm telling you this because I think it's important for the future of this allyship to have a good understanding of who is in the alliance and who is not. In my opinion as a Canadian, this Alliance will not work if we do not have a part of Alberta.

A hostile trading partner to the south with no end in sight for de-escalation for another 2.5 years.

Canada could double its trade overnight with the other 3 CANZUK nations and it wouldn’t come close to replacing the trade it does with the USA.

I am opposed to the idea of jumping in bed with China as the alternative, as I would like to see closer ties and increased trade with like-minded allies.

Is this the time that Canada and CANZUK pursue a more substantial trade alliance with the EU to offset the reliance on the US?

I'm not sure what my answer to this would be, so I am interested to hear what other people think.

And the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, and the Acts of Union (which provided for the formation of the United Kingdom), passed Parliament exactly one century and one week apart.

Hmmmm, maybe the UK should stick these on their type 26 warships....

This is a bit of a ramble but I thought I’d share some thoughts I’ve been having with some like-minded people.

The first thing to say is that I used to think of CANZUK as a bit of a gimmick, or an expression of post-imperial nostalgia by some people on the right of politics.

There was something to that view - in the past the most important relationships each of our countries had were with our neighbours. From the British perspective that meant the EU for our economy and the US for security; for Oz/NZ it was China for the economy and the US for security, and for Canada it was the US for both.

In happier times that made perfect sense; geography is very real, and the so-called ‘gravity model’ of trade must be acknowledged to be a real phenomenon. Likewise, the US was a reliable anchor for the entire western security order via NATO and its bilateral alliances with Oz/NZ. UK-Canada relations, for example, were important but naturally secondary. I think that essentially explains why we drifted apart after WW2.

However I’ve come around to the idea that this view undersells the most valuable commodity of all: trust.

We obviously share institutions, legal systems, political culture etc., but it goes deeper than that to a kind of shared cultural reference frame. When I look at Americans and see what they view as acceptable and normal in their country I feel their mindset is pretty alien, even though we share a language and are exposed to a lot of their cultural output. The level of trust isn’t quite the same.

Trust lets you do things together that are difficult or impossible otherwise. A good counterexample is the EU. Because the EU contains nations as diverse as Norway, Bulgaria and Portugal it demands a high level of harmonisation and standardisation to keep the show on the road, all enforced by Brussels. This means that EU states are necessarily not quite sovereign states any more, even to maintain the EU single market as it is currently.

This works fine for trade in goods, but most developed economies nowadays are much more services based by value, and the EU’s single market in services, by their own admission (see: Draghi Report), is pretty thin. Why don’t they have better integration of services trade in the EU single market? Reforms are politically difficult, but, crucially, they don’t trust each other enough to eg recognise each others’ professional qualifications. The same can be said for a capital markets union, or even the more federalist stuff like a fiscal (tax) union (German taxpayers subsidising Greek pension liabilities forever).

This is where CANZUK is interesting. Because of the high level of trust between us we could, for example, have mutual recognition of professional qualifications with minimal oversight from a centralised body ie we could have an arrangement that is more flexible, more seamless and more sovereign than what exists in the EU. It’s not even a theoretical concept - I understand Oz and NZ have such an arrangement already. It would just be a matter of expanding it to the UK and Canada.

That’s quite a narrow (but potentially very lucrative) example, but you can extend the logic to other areas of trade, or other policy areas entirely eg an Australian general leading British and Canadian troops (as happened in WW2).

Again, in the relatively stable world of the late 90s none of this would make sense, but in the 2020s and 2030s, with the world fracturing, with the existence of NATO in question; with the US and China pressuring CANZUK states, it makes sense to have as close ties as possible with the guys you know will always have your back.

That doesn’t mean we ignore our neighbours - eg the UK will always need to have a close (ideally closer) relationship with the EU on goods trade, but the world would benefit from a core group of states around which coalitions or broader agreements can form.

It also sits quite nicely with Carney’s farsighted Davos speech on ‘middle powers’. The geopolitical reality demands something of that nature.

The question is why isn’t this being pursued more aggressively? At least in the UK this can be explained by inertia - the bureaucracy and political class are still largely europeanist in their view of economic relations and Atlanticist in security. There will need to be a cultural change at the heart of government for things to change, but it does feel like it’s happening (albeit slowly).

Military strength would be competitive too. And imagine a shared travel benefit and sheer amount of educated people.

~150 million amazingly educated English speaking engineers, doctors, tech...

And a EU-sort passport of free travel

(17 year old Canadian by the way)

I might get down voted but while I like the idea of this I don't see it as economically rational. The one trading partner between all these nations is the US and excluding them doesn't make any sense.

I'm an American with a Canadian passport and wish both countries would be more open with each other. It's amazing how difficult it is to work and live in opposing countries if you're not a citizen. Especially an American going to Canada.

I feel like the anchor point to all four countries would be the US so why not include it?