There's also strict country of origin rules so if too many materials are sourced outside Canada, even if its made in Canada it can be subject to tariffs. Not to mention needing to adhere to EU standards.
A good example is the dairy protectionism in Canada that Trump so bitterly complains about. The issue is Canada manages its system with production quotas, but the US directly and indirectly subsidizes production. Who's being more (un)fair? How do you create a trading relationship around that?
A travesty, IMO. And a great loss making us all poorer. Not a patchwork of point-to-point free trade agreements, but several hub agreements that countries join, and, in time, the hubs agree to free trade between them too.
Imagine trying to integrate the politics of Japanese rice farming into the CAP.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1tda6wl/european_in...
Edit: The OP wrote 'schenzen' instead of 'schengen' before. That was the joke. Invisible now.
There is a real danger the Schengen agreement itself will collapse in the upcoming years - Germany is already ignoring both the Schengen agreement and its own courts by keeping border controls.
> Australia and the European Union signed a free trade agreement in March after eight years of negotiations, removing tariffs on almost all goods and potentially easing EU access to Australian critical minerals.
Reuters left out the most interesting part which is to allow service providers to work on either side and four year visas (which include work) in both directions.
All, of course, is a ramp to eventually shunning the US: the global bully.
Yes, we can!
>thereby restoring sovereignty
So Canada will be able to be in the EU single market but make its own trade rules and agreements then?
Let me fix your chant for you: No, it can't!
EU can't even shun Russia, let alone the US.
Whenever countries consider their needs and desires, and what they want their country to be, they look at the countries of Europe - not at Russia, not at the US, and not at China.
Australia 2015 √
Canada 2027 √
And normally this helps a country?
Having 2 groups working on related problems independently does not solve anything.
More good reliable friends is always better, and fuck the unreliable backstabbing ones as much as possible and reasonable, future will sort out details. World is not static, alliances change and we may revert in future if US population decides it wants to be ruled over by more reasonable, respectable and kind people.
There are no tariffs between Canadian provinces and never have been.
Did I say there were?
The US has higher thresholds in every state and no federal sales tax, and buyers pay the duties.
Even if Canada and Australia don't join the EU as full members which is unlikely anyway (deeper ties are definitely on the table though), these sort of announcements should put to bed these complete and utter fantasies the UK has about leading some alternative world order where it's in charge and can go toe to toe with the EU.
https://boris-johnson.com/2013/08/25/the-aussies-are-just-li...
https://www.ippr.org/articles/could-the-idea-of-the-anglosph...
Even many British would agree that Brexit was full of absolute lies, and even to this day you still see them being repeated in certain circles. These weren't even possibilities.
(Also Australian, but living in the US.)
https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/southeast-asia-pacific/au...
> U.S. goods and services (exports plus imports) trade with Australia totaled an estimated $102.0 billion in 2025, up 15.6 percent ($13.8 billion) from 2024.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/eu-australia...
> In 2024, trade in goods and services between the European Union and Australia was worth over €91 billion.
(That's $105B in FreedomBucks, and excludes the UK.)
>Even if Canada and Australia don't join the EU as full members which is unlikely anyway
And like I point out, deeper ties are definitely on the table which is more like what will happen. The world is reorganising around US tariffs as a natural economic reaction here.
Trump has upended decades of stable trade relationships. I would not assume anything right now.
(To be clear, neither Canada nor Australia are claimed to be seeking to be EU members - but closer trade ties with the EU appear to be on the cards for both nations. When you can no longer trust the US to act in good faith, everything changes.)
The European project is bigger than the EU - that's just the central core.
There's also the EFTA, EEA, CEFTA, CU, Eurozone, Shengen, CoE, and Swiss-style bilateral treaties.
See https://thisbugslife.com/2021/05/10/graphic-representation-o...
Canada can easily find a home one of these.
I'd love to have full rights to live and work in the EU, but I'd be happy just being able to visit the EU as a Canadian and use the EU customs lines. I don't think Canada would go for full mobility. We're just now dealing with the backlash of too many immigrants from South Asia, a "flood" of poorer Eastern Europeans would probably rekindle that.
I don't disagree, but by this standard North Korea is a democratic republic, and Turkey's membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a bit odd.
There are no real limitations outside of dairy, poultry, and eggs; same as on the US front. If it is so difficult why is there nothing in place, aside from those three categories? Are these the only food categories that matter to people? What about the food that the animals in those categories eat?
> but the US directly and indirectly subsidizes production.
Since the Obama era, the US and Canada have had essentially the same subsidy system, save dairy, poultry, and eggs, which, as you pointed out, get their own special rules. But as you pointed out they are still subsidized indirectly via things like corn subsidies, which is where Canada and the US are now effectively on the same page (that wasn't always the case, of course, but the reforms happened a long time ago now and what went on 30 years ago doesn't mean much anymore). When cooler heads prevailed the US played fair in aligning their system to Canada's, so why isn't the same being willing to be offered in kind? Changing the diary, poultry, and egg system doesn't mean giving up subsidies, if the people want to continue to offer subsidies. The US model already offers a way to provide that. Canada already accepts that for other food products, so there is nothing unprecedented there.
Of course, it's not really about the farmers/production, is it? It is about protecting Saputo, Lactalis, and Agropur's triopoly.
The US subsidies tend to be more indirect, meaning that the large agri-corporations capture most of it. Farmers in the US have been struggling for years and the Canadian farmers know this (and for better or for worse have political capital at their disposal).
The reason dairy, poultry, and eggs are under Canada's system is because they are not bulk commodities that ship around the world like grains do. Canada also doesn't allow a lot of the farming methods (including hormones) that the USA does. The original aim of supply management was to smooth out the market, but of course has morphed into a cartel.
For the record, I'd love to see the dismantling of supply management the same way New Zealand did (and became an export powerhouse of processed dairy products after). I do love me some cheese and I wish the EU cheese was more economically available.
It's essentially the same system, with the primary subsidy being paying 60% of crop insurance premium in Canada and 62% in the US. Of course since crop insurance is acre-based, those with the largest landholdings capture most of the subsidy, but that is equally true in Canada. It's probably true that the US has some larger farms, given the much larger arable landbase (and one of Canada's largest farms just having recently gone bankrupt!), which is what I expect you are trying to say, but I'm not sure how pertinent that is as it is still an equal payout on a relative scale.
> they are not bulk commodities that ship around the world like grains do.
Neither is milk from other animals (e.g. goats), other types of meats (e.g. pork, beef), etc. but none of these have the same system. Moreover, until 2009 tobacco was also supply managed under the same system and it is a bulk commodity that is shipped around the world. So I'm not sure your theory, as fun as it is, holds.
> Canada also doesn't allow a lot of the farming methods (including hormones) that the USA does.
It's a mixed bag. Canada puts higher value on animal welfare, but is much more lax when it comes to things like pesticides. The US doesn't allow hormone use in poultry, so that doesn't really explain what purpose supply management serves either.
I'm clarifying that the trade barriers on things like liquor and food between Canadian provinces are regulations, not tariffs.
I'm not aware of steps backwards (as in US-Canada relations) where barriers between provinces increased. Am I wrong to be optimistic?
Yes. We’re not interested in joining the EU. And we’re not interested in becoming a US state.
But trade doesn’t need to go all the way to DC. By plane, Sydney to LA is about - 13.5 hours. Sydney to Brussels is 20 hours. I imagine the difference is even greater for cargo ships, which can sail directly through the pacific. I have no idea how cargo goes from Australia to Europe. That sounds like a complex route.
As for trade, the US is important but they’re not our most important trading partner. China accounts for $326 billion aud in trade annually. If your numbers are right, that’s more than our trade with the US and Europe combined.
I suspect integrating into the EU single market wouldn’t be worth it for us. We’re not part of Europe. We’re not a European country.
The article isn't about joining the EU (as the original post you replied to called it, "unlikely anyway").
> But trade doesn’t need to go all the way to DC.
Nor Brussels; Perth to Greece via the Suez cuts the time, too.
> As for trade, the US is important but they’re not our most important trading partner.
OK, but the EU and US trade with Australia roughly equivalently per the numbers, and you said "Our major trading partners are nearby countries, like China, Japan, NZ, and the US. Not continental Europe." It's just a flatly false claim.
https://commission.europa.eu/topics/trade/eu-australia-trade...
https://www.austrade.gov.au/en/how-we-can-help-you/australia...
No it's not. For bulk commodities, the US subsidies are largely commodity-specific and acre-based; Canadian support is whole-farm and income-based. US subsidies trigger when income margins fall below a set percentage; an Iowa farmer with base acres gets a price loss coverage payment whenever the national corn price is low, good year or not. A Canadian prairie farmer with a good year gets nothing regardless of wheat prices. In the US, most of the money goes to row-crop growers on large acreages, increasingly through discretionary ad hoc payments. In Canada, most money goes to prairie grain and oilseed farms through yield-triggered insurance. If you excluded dairy, US subsidies account for about ~9% of farm receipts (plus or minus a quarter percent depending on year) and Canada ~5% (long term average; payouts tend to spike in bad years).
Swinging to dairy, the US actually sets price floors for wholesale dairy and transfers revenue across processed dairy types. The US system also pays out directly to farmers if margins fall too much (the calculations of said margins is complicated, but it essentially encourages production even if prices fall due to oversupply). These subsidies have historically encouraged overproduction and consolidation and the issue has become acute as the rates of dairy consumption hasn't matched population growth due to a variety of reasons (eg veganism, milk alternatives, etc). One reason Trump has been complaining is because the US would love to have somewhere to dump said surplus.
The Canadian dairy system (which I want to make abundantly clear I'm not defending!), basically links pricing against a hard quota. The result is higher prices for consumers, and tariffs that make unique foreign cheeses very expensive.
> Neither is milk from other animals (e.g. goats), other types of meats (e.g. pork, beef), but none of these have the same system. Moreover, until 2009 tobacco was also supply managed under the same system and it is a bulk commodity that is shipped around the world. So I'm not sure your theory, as fun as it is, holds.
> ... this doesn't explain what is special about the three (once four) agriculture categories.
Because it's political! Tobacco farmers used to be a force to be reckoned with, but when smoking rates plummeted they lost a lot of said power. Other forms of dairy were niche enough not to matter. Bulk meat (beef, pork, etc) are a relatively recent phenomenon and were part of a world trade market by then, whereas chicken, milk, and eggs were considered a staple.
If you're a Canadian dairy farmer, the US system looks like it encourages production above all else and the subsidies are structured enough where a large one-off issue (herd sickness, serious equipment breakdown, etc) will wipe you out. The number of US dairy farms is down almost 80% since the 1990s and it's been driven by low margins. Canadian farmers have a lot more of a direct influence on their government (again for better or for worse).
This is what I meant when I said "Creating a fair and level trading system around it is difficult" because you run up against these interests. I would much prefer a theoretical fair trade system where Canada didn't protect its poultry/dairy and the US didn't protect its sugar (which has a lot of similarities to CA dairy supply management, though the foreign import limits are proportionately less).
Again, the largest component is crop insurance, which is modelled essentially the same as it is in Canada. ~60% of the premium is paid for by the government in both cases. The payout is dependent upon acres.
> The number of US dairy farms is down almost 80% since the 1990s
And 74% in Canada, for what it is worth.
> If you're a Canadian dairy farmer
Not anymore. I am among the 74%. The double-edged sword with the stability offered by supply management is that it makes borrowing much easier (effectively government-guaranteed cashflow), which pushes the price of everything higher, so the economics aren't all that great unless you sold your $100,000 per acre farm in the Netherlands or Germany to pay for it.
> the US system looks like it encourages production above all else
I am not sure I would say that. Co-ops with quota-like systems are not uncommon in the US. What their system does allow is that one guy who thinks he can undercut the prevailing market to slide in, while Canada has a legal path to put a halt to such behaviour. Maybe that's something favourable, but why only in dairy, poultry, and eggs? Isn't that something that every market would want?
> Canadian farmers have a lot more of a direct influence on their government
I do remain a Canadian farmer, though, so I would love for you to expand upon that thought.
> Because it's political!
This is quite a deviation from the bulk commodity/farming practice explanation before. Why the change in tune?
Only if you look at it from a permanent funding point of view. The US gov'ts portion of crop insurance in the USA amounted to $14B in 2026, but ad hoc/disaster spending (which is separate from insurance) is $26B and an alphabet soup of Farm Bill programs is $15.6B. And the bulk of the farm bill's spending (70-80%) is indirect via SNAP and other programs that Canada doesn't really have (though measuring how much if this is an actual farming subsidy is very difficult).
> And 74% in Canada, for what it is worth.
I was basing my statement on numbers I saw off of American stats (which go back further easily obtainable data), but the Canadian/US numbers I can directly pull up comparisons are from 2018 to 2025 (raw statistics Canada data is hard to come by, something the USA does much better on):
Canada: 10,679 → 9,048 = −15.3%
USA: 37,468 → 23,609 = −37.0%
The exit experience is different, though. A CA dairy farmer leaves with a capital asset in their quotas as well as any land/equipment/herd value. A US dairy farmer is liquidating just the latter. Anecdotally, I grew up in Winchester, Ontario which is a dairy hub - a lot of the farming kids I grew up with didn't want to get into farming and a lot of the family farms were sold off and a lot of them are quite comfortable. A lot of farms closer to Ottawa also got gobbled up by suburbs.
> I am not sure I would say that. Co-ops with quota-like systems are not uncommon in the US. What their system does allow is that one guy who thinks he can undercut the prevailing market to slide in, while Canada has a legal path to put a halt to such behaviour. Maybe that's something favourable, but why only in dairy, poultry, and eggs? Isn't that something that every market would want?
Again, I'm not defending supply management, but the dairy farmers are holding onto it and it's been a major pain in almost all of Canada's trade agreements. The fact that Canadian politicians are fighting so hard for it isn't because it's a better system. The one advantage of the Canadian system is that it costs the government little and you don't really contribute to it if you don't consume milk, though. But I'm for free trade and fewer subsidies all around.
> I do remain a Canadian farmer, though, so I would love for you to expand upon that thought.
Dairy farmers have put enough pressure on politicians across the political spectrum that they vigorously defend supply management that, due to its inflexibility, is a major trade headache for Canada from an industry that makes up a very small portion of economic output in Canada; it almost cost us the USMCA renegotiations and caused the CETA negotiations to last much, much longer than necessary.
Awhile back, the nominally free market federal Conservatives forced CN and CP to have minimal grain shipment numbers to deal with a bumper crop because the farmers were fuming at higher freight rail prices against other commodities (mainly oil at the time).
> This is quite a deviation from the bulk commodity/farming practice explanation before. Why the change in tune?
I don't see it as a change in tune. My original comment was that "Agriculture is always the hardest due to a variety of factors, including standards, but also farming is among the most subsidized and/or protected businesses in the developed world. Creating a fair and level trading system around it is difficult." Agriculture made up ~90% of the economy when most modern countries were founded and the political weight is often historical (and arguably constitutionally baked-in in the USA which gives smaller predominately rural states equal numbers of Senators, of which in the USA are very powerful). It's been an American political joke for ages that kissing babies is less important than kissing corn during the primaries that started in Iowa. Also, the Canadian farmers were very upset at the very limited expanded access USMCA provided us dairy farmers.
The US unequivocally supports corn production, which feeds (pun not intended) into cheaper feed for livestock. But these subsidies can be labelled as "strategic" energy independence (ignoring if that's actually the case or not). Is that fair? Should Canada then have to encourage corn production the same way? How would/do you untangle this? It's a political problem.
Untangling these into a fair trade (in the free sense) would require political capital that some countries or parties may or may not have.
I'll finish that I think we broadly agree on how things SHOULD be, but I see the barriers to getting there as not politically feasible. If it was, supply management would already be gone. It causes higher prices and the benefits are highly marginal.
How? I do remember the big protests in the 90s quite well, certainly, but that was 30-some-odd years ago and when, as we saw earlier, there were 300% more diary farmers. Pressure doesn't last forever, especially as you grow into insignificance.
From what I see the pressure comes from the general public, mostly from having built up this idea that supply management keeps "hormone laden" milk out of the market, combined with the people of Quebec seeing any kind of federal "meddling" as an attack on their people.
When longstanding party favourite Maxime Bernier ran for leader of the CPC, the as you say the nominally free market party, on the platform of eliminating supply management it wasn't just dairy farmers who laughed him out of the room. It was everyone. Same thing happened with the early PPC party, before eventually pandering to the crazies to try and find any kind of support. It was quite clearly non-farmers who wanted no part in seeing an end to supply management.
> because the farmers were fuming at higher freight rail prices against other commodities
Words are only worth so much, granted, but when this occurred it was framed as being necessary for the sake of the entire Canadian economy and to preserve Canada's reputation as a trustworthy supplier. The message sent was abundantly clear that it wasn't being done to appease farmers. How do you translate that into farmers having political sway?
They have an organized lobby that straddles a lot of important ridings in eastern Ontario and parts of Quebec. It also includes a lot of the broader dairy industry. I could accept the argument that it is no longer as powerful as it once was, but I haven't met many non-industry people who care either way. All being equal, Canadians would prefer lower prices, I think. I don't think the general public would have cared, especially if Europe flooded us with cheaper gouda or brie. There has always been a dose of anti-americanism that bounces from healthy to unhealthy and back depending on the geopolitical climate, though.
> when this occurred it was framed as being necessary for the sake of the entire Canadian economy and to preserve Canada's reputation as a trustworthy supplier. The message sent was abundantly clear that it wasn't being done to appease farmers. How do you translate that into farmers having political sway?
CN and CP were already moving records amount of grain that year (IIRC almost 40% above previous records), so to argue that it put Canada's reputation at risk rings hollow. It was because farmers were getting squeezed storing it as well as paying for higher freight costs, on top of the fact that many grain companies and farmers held onto grain from the previous harvest for a variety of reasons. Many grain farmers, who used to have to sell their wheat to the wheat board, got caught flat footed when trying to go out on their own due to then recent deregulation (I'm not convinced this last argument effected things as much as some claim, though).