EU removes mention of ‘associate membership’ from Canada declaration

The EU has dropped “associate membership” from the draft EU-Canada summit declaration after German objections, replacing it with “ever closer association”. The EU has dropped any mention of associate membership from the latest draft of the joint declaration due to be adopted at the end of the EU-Canada summit in Montreal on Thursday and Friday. The proposal, introduced at Germany’s insistence in a revised text circulated to member states on Wednesday, has been replaced by a commitment to “ever closer association” between the EU and Canada, but short of full membership itself. The office of European Council President António Costa has spent recent hours in intense talks with several member states, above all Germany, which objected to the term in the political declaration. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen floated the idea in her State of the Union address to the European Parliament last month, inviting Canada to become the first EU associate member. An earlier draft was put to member states on Tuesday under the silent procedure, under which a text is deemed adopted unless a country explicitly objects. Germany, France, Italy and Greece all raised issues with it. Germany has been the most vocal opponent of the term. Chancellor Friedrich Merz had previously proposed a similar status for Ukraine as a way to give Kyiv security guarantees before it fully joins the bloc. For Berlin, the priority is to define what closer cooperation with Ottawa means in practice, rather than shoehorn the package into a term that is absent from the treaties and could carry significant legal implications. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has favoured the phrase “alliance for the future”, saying he wanted to focus on the substance of the agreement and that the terminology was for the EU to settle. The latest version of the text has been submitted again for silent procedure, meaning it will be adopted unless EU countries object to it later this afternoon.