Mounting trade deficits have convinced the president of the United States that ‘we have too long acted as Uncle Sugar and now we’ve got to be Uncle Sam’. The ten per cent surcharge he plans to impose on imports of manufactured goods from across the world will devastate Canada, because most of its exports go to the United States and its prosperity is particularly dependent on its cross-border automobile industry. Prime Minister Trudeau – dismissed by the president as a ‘son of bitch’ – heads to Washington to plead for an exemption from the charges, which he fears will help the Americans to ‘colonise’ his country. Although he wins a reprieve, his mind turns to economic diversification, which requires expanding trade with Canada’s cultural and political soulmates in Europe.

The year is 1971 not 2025. The president is Richard Nixon, the prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The history of the Framework Agreement for Economic and Commercial Co-Operation that Trudeau went on to sign with the European Community in 1976 resonates curiously today, as Canadians are again wondering how to reduce their economic exposure to the United States. Mark Carney, who lately replaced Trudeau’s son Justin as prime minister, has announced that Canada will ‘take a lead in building a likeminded coalition of countries which share our values’. During his first official visit – to Paris, rather than Washington – Carney claimed Canada as the ‘most European of non-European countries’.

Excitable commentators hope that after winning the upcoming federal election, Carney will sign a deep trade deal with the EU as a first step to salvaging the free trade principles incoherently violated by Trump. Yet the history of Trudeau père’s initiative in the 1970s suggests that it is easier for politicians to declare changes to Canada’s identity than to bring them about.

As far as its population goes, Canada is undoubtedly one of the most European of non-European countries. In 2016, around 20 million of its 35 million people were of European descent. After English-speaking statesmen spent decades trying and failing to attract British settlers to fill up new lands in western Canada, Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government changed tack and opened up the prairies to farmers from Central and Eastern Europe. Although the outbreak of the First World War, then the suspicion of Conservative governments, abruptly halted this population boom, Liberal leaders after the Second World War once more encouraged mass immigration from Central and Southern Europe.

Rudyard Kipling had warned Canadians in Laurier’s day that welcoming too many East Europeans of an alien religion and ethnicity would fray their ties with Britain. Yet these population flows did little to draw Canada closer to the Continent. The Americanisation of Canada remained a more pressing concern. Although the electorate decisively rejected Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s efforts to reduce tariff barriers with the United States in the 1911 election, an ever-higher proportion of Canadian trade flowed from north to south rather than across the Atlantic.

The Second World War decisively advanced Canada’s dependence on American goods, capital and defence spending. By the 1950s, only about 15 per cent of Canada’s trade was with the United Kingdom and six per cent with Continental Europe, most of which was in the form of raw material exports. Efforts to reverse this pattern were spotty. In the early 1960s, a woolly initiative by the Anglophile Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to redirect 15 per cent of trade to the United Kingdom failed when Canadians refused to buy its tiny fridges or wonky cars.

When Pierre Elliott Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, one of his priorities was to gain greater independence from the United States – a ‘problem Canada shares with the European nations’. He seemed well suited to resolve it, personifying as he did his country’s bifurcated heritage and complex position in the world. His father was from an old French family, but had challenged the lockhold of Anglophones on the most dynamic sectors of Quebec’s economy by founding a chain of car garages in Montreal and becoming a wealthy investor. His mother was an English convert to Roman Catholicism.

Although Trudeau’s friends felt his teenage visits to the States had ‘Americanised’ him, his Jesuit education – in English – made him an ardent Roman Catholic and a patriot. Having failed to get a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, he studied law in Montreal and associated with clerical and antisemitic nationalists. During the Second World War, he shared their scepticism about Canada’s participation in Britain’s imperial quarrel with Germany and fiercely opposed the extension of conscription to Quebec.

Postgraduate studies at Harvard and the London School of Economics broadened his mind and awakened a deep interest in political economy. Yet a bohemian stint in postwar Paris deepened his interest in personalism, a distinctively Catholic philosophy of social conscience.

On his return to Canada, Trudeau eventually gravitated to the federal Liberals because he came to see Ottawa as the ally of French Canadians in their search for equality. An inheritance allowed him to spend the 1950s and early 1960s as a rather devout playboy – he drove a flash convertible, but lived with his mother, didn’t lose his virginity until he was 28 and requested the Church’s permission to read Marxist books. As he bounced between the civil service, journalism and academia, he also became a sharp critic of the governments who ran Quebec in collaboration with the bishops.

While he backed the ‘Quiet Revolution’ that overthrew the Church’s supremacy in the 1960s, he also turned against nationalism as a regressive force. After his election in 1965 as a Liberal MP for Montreal, he relished confrontations with Quebec nationalists. Shortly after becoming prime minister, he famously stared down bottle throwing protestors who targeted him during a celebration of Quebec’s national day. Trudeau wanted Quebeckers to take their place in a distinctively North American society, whose prosperity could dilute historic divides between Protestant and Catholic, Anglophone and Francophone.

Europe rather than the United States initially produced the most pressing threat to what he termed ‘the survival of Canada as a federal and bilingual sovereign state’. In contrast to Carney, he initially shunned Paris because he objected to General Charles de Gaulle’s support for enhanced sovereignty or even independence for Quebec.

As France’s president cast around for counterweights to Anglo-Saxon hegemony, he developed a passion for the ‘French fact’ in North America, the descendants of the ancien régime French settlers who were concentrated in the province of Quebec. In 1967 De Gaulle visited Quebec during the centenary of Confederation – although he saw nothing to celebrate in a settlement that had completed Britain’s subjugation of French North America. His tumultuous visit ended with an impromptu address from the balcony of Montreal town hall in which he intoned, ‘Vive Québec libre!’ When Prime Minister Lester Pearson indicated he would pass over this bizarre outbreak in silence, Trudeau convinced him to condemn it. De Gaulle flew home the next day, his aides applauding him for settling the ‘debt of Louis XV’.

This ‘war of flags’ dragged on, because De Gaulle still insisted on treating Canada as a rickety, bogus entity brought into being by a pen stroke from Queen Victoria. After Trudeau became prime minister, De Gaulle huffed that he would extend no friendship to the ‘chief adversary of the French fact in Canada’.

In retirement, Trudeau mused that the architects of Confederation had left the provinces too much scope to make mischief by failing to give the federal government a monopoly on foreign policy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Quebec’s separatists got themselves invited as national leaders to summits around the Francophone world. Federal officials grimly chaperoned them to Niger, insisting that they style themselves as representatives of ‘Canada-Québec’.

The problems tailed off after the General’s resignation in 1969, but his successors, George Pompidou and Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, were not much more inclined to treat Canada as a proper country. In 1975 Giscard invited the Italians but not the Canadians to Chateau Rambouillet for the first summit of leading economies. It took Kissinger to secure Canada’s attendance to the next meeting and membership of what became the G-7.

A heterodox approach to Canada’s traditions of foreign policy also distanced Trudeau from Europe. Liberal governments since the Second World War had worked on Atlanticist assumptions. Stiff levels of military spending enabled Canada’s armed forces to make a significant commitment to NATO’s defence of Western Europe against Soviet Eurasia. In his second term in office, Pearson swiftly reversed efforts by Diefenbaker’s government to free Canada from America’s nuclear industrial complex. He put Canadian jet fighters and an infantry brigade equipped with tactical nuclear weapons in the front line against the Soviets. Pearson was a multilateralist as well as an Atlanticist, who wanted to associate America and Europe in shared commitment to the United Nations and the liberalising rounds of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.

Trudeau felt he knew better. He listened to dissident officials who were wondering whether Canada’s NATO commitments really promoted its interests. The costly deployment in West Germany, which would be quickly wiped out by Soviet invaders, left Canada unable to afford the proper defence of its coastlines. They didn’t generate spin-off benefits either: during the 1960s the share of Canada’s exports that went to Europe sank to 16 per cent of the whole, half of which went to the United Kingdom. Prowling the fringes of the Eastern bloc with nuclear armed jets struck Trudeau as dangerous sabre rattling. Having travelled through the USSR during his gadfly apprenticeship, he saw it as a legitimate diplomatic player, rather than a menace to the free world.

Trudeau nonetheless alarmed European leaders when he cut Canada’s NATO contingent in half and denuclearised it. The West Germans took it as a sign that the Americans were preparing to pull their forces out too – ironic when Trudeau was signalling his independence.

This shrunken commitment to Europe’s defence meant that Trudeau faced scepticism when he reacted to the Nixon shock by claiming that Canada would seek a ‘Third Option’ of closer economic ties with Europe and Japan, instead of maintaining or even deepening its dependence on the United States. Trudeau had supported the UK’s entry into the European Economic Community – making him one of the few people Edward Heath actually liked.

Yet when that happened in 1973, Canada’s only significant trading partner other than the States went behind a European fence. That caused Trudeau to borrow his foreign minister’s idea of a ‘contractual link’ to secure Canada’s access to the Community. The Economist joked that a better name would be the ‘missing link’ because no one knew why it was needed. As Trudeau didn’t seem to be asking for preferential treatment, the European Commission felt that the most favoured nation terms of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) already regulated the modest trade between them: only 12 per cent of Canada’s exports went to Europe and only two per cent of Europe’s exports to Canada. The Canadians proposed a link to secure GATT terms; the Europeans worried it would complicate them.

Trudeau, who had hitherto avoided the Continent, now raced around its capitals to sell his hazy vision. A trip to Paris moved Giscard d’Estaing to say that he now ‘understands what Canada is’, but the link remained elusive. The West Germans helped out at this delicate juncture, not because they were interested in their relatively minuscule trade with Canada, but because they interpreted the link as a gesture that renewed North America’s commitment to their security. A grateful Trudeau purchased German Leopard tanks for Canada’s NATO forces.

As the Germans understood, Henry Kissinger’s breezy endorsement of Canada’s link with Europe made Trudeau’s overture anything but a declaration of independence. Although neither Trudeau nor Nixon enjoyed their meetings – learning years later that the president had put him down as an ‘asshole’, Trudeau quipped he had been called worse things by better people – both were alike in believing in the conscious uncoupling of their countries. In 1972, Nixon had told the Canadian parliament in Ottawa that their ‘special relationship’ was over and welcomed a new ‘pattern of economic interaction’ that ‘respects Canada’s right to chart its own economic course’.

Such realism was welcome to Trudeau. He intended the third option not to express but to defuse the ‘chauvinism’ and autarkic economics that were becoming popular on the left of his party and in Canada as a whole. He still saw Canada as a North American society and worked readily with Nixon’s successors, especially Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. When Rene Lévesque took power in Quebec in 1976 and once more courted Gaullist support in France for Quebec’s sovereignty, Trudeau hugged the Americans closer. In 1977 he argued in an emotional address to Congress that the collapse of Canada’s federation would dismay the civilised world and warned investors in New York that victory for Lévesque in an upcoming referendum on independence would deliver a deep shock to North America.

The 1976 Agreement with the European Community is best seen then as one of Trudeau’s notorious pirouettes, which grabbed the world’s attention without really altering Canada’s vassalage to the United States. Within five years of its introduction, the share of Canadian exports going to Europe had declined to just 11 per cent (it was the same story with Japan, where diplomacy proved just as inconclusive). The agreement sent a European ambassador to Ottawa and set up annual meetings between Canadian and European officials, but the Canadian Manufacturers Association dismissed it as a ‘bland bucket of fog’. Business people preferred dealing with their Anglophone neighbours to the hard work of learning foreign languages and consumer tastes.

Hefty obstacles to freer trade remained. Trudeau’s anxieties about nuclear proliferation had put tough constraints on the export of Canada’s rich deposits of uranium ore. Canadian foresters who exported ‘green’ lumber were obliged to strip and heat logs after Baltic countries took fright at the spread of insect pests. The Common Agricultural Policy continued to keep out Canadian exporters even as tariffs remained at historically low levels.

The Canadians could be no less forceful in protecting their interests, as when they accused Spanish and Portuguese trawlers of collapsing fish stocks in the North Atlantic. The Canadian navy expanded its patrols, which the government had pre-emptively exempted from the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and then in 1994 fired a live round across the bows of the Estai, a vessel that had exceeded its catch of Greenland halibut. This ‘turbot war’ blew up and was resolved without any reference to the Framework Agreement.

The global recession that began during Trudeau’s last term in office (1980-84) further depressed trade by stalling both the Canadian and European economies. Fears were growing that Canada might end up caught between American and European blocs, both of which began to resile from GATT’s commitments to freer trade.

This encouraged Trudeau’s Conservative successor Brian Mulroney to enter bilateral talks for secure market access to the United States and to expose Canada’s sluggish manufacturers to proper competition. The Liberal party furiously opposed Mulroney’s deal with the United States as a threat to Canadian sovereignty, but he triumphed in the 1988 federal election that served as a referendum on it. When his agreement came into force, it proved more effective than Trudeau’s third option because it built on the declared preferences of businesses. In its first decade of operation, merchandise exports to the United States doubled as a share of Canadian GDP.

Economic continentalism went with cutbacks to Canada’s political and military commitments to Europe. The minister of external affairs, Joe Clark, skipped meetings with his European counterparts for three years running. The fall of the Berlin Wall caused a brief revival of interest in Europe: in 1990 Clark declared Canada to be a ‘European nation’ and Mulroney signed a Transatlantic Declaration with the President of the European Council in Rome. But the implosion of the Soviet Union removed the logic of Canada’s historic commitment to European security: two years later, Mulroney announced the withdrawal of Canada’s remaining troops from Europe, by which time the Community only accounted for around six per cent of its exports. When the House of Commons reported on transatlantic trade in 2001, it concluded that it was more or less dormant.

A bilateral initiative to revive these ties had to wait until 2016 when Chrystia Freeland – who has Ukrainian roots – negotiated and Justin Trudeau signed a Comprehensive Economic Treaty Arrangement with the European Union. It not only eliminated most remaining tariffs on goods, but associated trade with the principles of sustainable development and climate action. CETA promised to reaffirm a rules-based international order just as Donald Trump’s first presidency was wreaking havoc on it. Canadian Prime Ministers were to meet with the President of the Commission yearly and 30 ‘dialogue groups’ from business and civil society were formed.

Yet in a familiar turn of events, statecraft has not drummed up trade. Canadian manufacturers have been slow to take up their allocation of tariff-free exports. Canadian farmers still grumble that the EU’s standards and rules of origin shut them out, European ones that they can’t sell cheese to Canada.

Pierre Trudeau likened Canada’s experience of neighbouring the United States to sharing a bed with an elephant, in which you were affected by every ‘twitch and grunt’. Carney’s problem is that building a relationship with Europe to compensate for or even replace its economic ties with the United States now requires cosying up to another self-absorbed elephant. The EU has 447 million people to Canada’s 37 million and a GDP that is 15 times larger. While it is Canada’s biggest trade partner outside the States, the relationship is asymmetric: only about one per cent of its global trade is with Canada. No amount of good will can transform Canada into an important market for its goods and services or change the reality that EU countries prosper by trading mainly with one another.

Reflecting on his career in foreign policy, Trudeau remarked that ‘distance and geographic features often bear little weight’ in a country’s identification of its neighbours. The on-off relationship he initiated with Europe suggests that while imagination certainly shapes, it cannot supplant economics or geopolitics. If it wants to gain greater control over its economic identity, the route to doing so starts not with visionary partnerships – whether with the EU or as part of a CANZUK alliance – but with the dull work of removing interprovincial barriers to a single home market, boosting domestic productivity and generating the small- and medium-sized companies that are confident in exporting goods and services. It looks like Canada will be in bed with the American elephant for some time yet.