Carney Calls Canada-EU 'Middle Powers' Alliance Before
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- Mark Carney warned of a 'global rupture' at the De Chastelain Public Lecture series at Trinity College Dublin on Saturday, telling an audience that included Irish PM Micheal Martin that the post-Cold War rules-based order is 'breaking down' and economic integration is being 'weaponised.'
- Carney pitched Canada and the EU as a 'middle powers' alliance, noting their combined population is 'more than twice that of the United States' and their collective defence budget is 'twice that of China's.'
- The G7 summit runs June 15-17 in Evian-les-Bains, France, with both Carney and Trump expected to attend — Carney kept his Saturday remarks general and did not name any country violating the rules-based order.
- Carney proposed linking the EU with the Trans-Pacific Partnership to create a trading bloc of 'more than a billion and a half people,' citing shared vulnerabilities to 'once-distant threats.'
- Since becoming Canada's PM in 2025, Carney became the first non-European leader to join the European Political Community Summit in May and secured Canada's spot in Europe's SAFE Instrument defence loan programme in February.
- Trump pushed back on Carney's earlier Davos 'middle powers' speech from his own podium there, saying 'Canada lives because of the United States' and telling Carney to be 'grateful.'
Why it matters: Carney is pitching a Canada-EU bloc — combined population twice the US, proposed trade alliance of 1.5 billion people via EU-Trans-Pacific Partnership linkage — as a counterweight to US trade coercion, and he's doing it days before sharing a G7 table with Trump in France.
