Canada and the European Union

Abstract

Europe matters to Canada. Not only is the European Union Canada's second-largest trading and investment partner, but the two political systems also share similar political, economic, and cultural values - all played out in a more-or-less similar system of multilevel governance. Canada and the European Union also share many common problems and policy challenges. These include, for instance, governing diverse communities in the context of a loose federal system, integrating widely diverse immigrant populations, finding viable strategies to address environmental issues and climate change, reducing barriers to trade, countering declines in citizen participation in politics, and balancing new security concerns with human rights. In all of these areas and more, there are opportunities for Canada and the European Union to learn from each other/In the context of an enhanced realization that knowledge is cumulative and that learning for policy and practice should be evidence-based, there has been renewed general interest in systematic reviews of existing research.2 Analysis of existing research can help identify cross-cutting themes and expose key gaps in knowledge. As a kind of stock-taking, research synthesis can also provide a useful foundation for future work. In 1981, Daniel Roseman summarized the scholarly works that had been published since 1976 on European Community-Canada relations.3 The present article organizes and assesses the research that has been published on the transatlantic relationship and on policy learning between Canada and the EU from 1982 through 2010. The following questions are used to guide the review: What does the literature tell us about the Canada-EU relationship? What comparisons between the two entities have been made? Has the research demonstrated lessons can be learned by comparing the one to the other? What are the gaps in the literature? What fruitful avenues for future research can we identify?The literature search involved a review of English and French databases, as well as systematic searches of various journals, books, book chapters, conference papers, workshops, research institutes, think tanks, and documents from the internet.4 Directed follow-up was undertaken with knowledgeable authors, and detailed searches were carried out of publications known to be interested in Canada-EU issues. The resulting hits generated many publications whose focus was broader in scope than just Canada and the European Union, involving other countries such as the United States or trading blocs such as the North American free trade agreement. Those broader articles were omitted. Single-country bilateral comparisons, for example between Canada and the United Kingdom, were also deliberately excluded, as the objective was to look at the European Union as a collective entity. The review did not examine works on Canada's relations with Europe through multilateral organizations such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Labour Organization, the World Trade Organization, or the United Nations. Government publications, political statements, newspaper articles, and advocacy group literature, as well as policy briefs and memos available on the Canada- Europe transatlantic dialogue website were also excluded. As the intent was to discover what is known, the 152 publications reviewed for this article are detailed in an annotated bibliography, available on the CanadaEurope transatlantic dialogue website: this bibliography of publications examined for this review will be updated periodically.5Over 45 percent of the publications reviewed appeared in refereed academic journals (mostly international or European), while 30 percent were in books or book chapters. A total of 10 conferences with proceedings were identified, and 15 percent of the perspectives were provided by think tanks. …