Former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland is telling Canada to drop any notion of joining the European Union and instead strike a deeper economic bargain with the United States, arguing the two countries have let a trade dispute curdle into something closer to a breakup.
In a new opinion piece, Sondland says Washington and Ottawa have spent months acting like partners in a failing relationship, each convinced the other is cheating them, each airing grievances publicly rather than fixing the underlying problem.
His diagnosis: both sides need to get back to the table, not for another narrow tariff truce, but to build what he calls a new North American economic relationship between the two most integrated economies in the democratic world.
No 51st State, No Free Pass Either
Sondland insists Canada is a sovereign nation and rejects any talk of it as the "51st state." But he pairs that with a warning to Ottawa: sovereignty doesn’t mean permanent one-sided access to American markets. If Canada wants to keep privileged entry to the U.S., he argues, it has to deal with the barriers American businesses complain about — banking, dairy, government procurement, digital rules, industrial subsidies, and autos.
He faults Washington for leaning on tariffs and public shaming as leverage, and faults Ottawa for responding by treating diversification away from the U.S. as a goal in itself. Neither approach, he writes, is a real strategy.
The EU Idea Gets Rejected Outright
Sondland takes direct aim at the idea, floated in some circles, that Canada should pursue European Union membership. He calls it a legal non-starter since EU membership is reserved for European states, and argues that even if Brussels somehow made an exception, it would be a bad deal for Canada.
Joining the EU, he writes, would force Canada to hand its trade policy over to the bloc’s common external tariff and regulatory system, risking a new customs and regulatory wall between Canada and the American market that actually buys its exports and supplies its industry. Decisions affecting Canadian businesses would then be made in Europe, far from the roads, rail lines, power grids, and pipelines that actually run the Canadian economy.
"That is not sovereignty. It is outsourcing sovereignty," Sondland writes.
A Continental Alternative
Instead, Sondland lays out a specific North American plan built around shared production and resources rather than competing subsidies. On autos, he wants common rules of origin with real North American content, shared EV and battery standards, mutually recognized safety rules, and incentives that reward continental manufacturing instead of triggering subsidy fights between the U.S. and Canada.
On energy, he wants the U.S. and Canada to position themselves as the world’s most reliable combined supplier of oil, gas, electricity, uranium, and critical minerals, through a energy-security compact covering shared infrastructure, faster cross-border approvals, joint mineral processing, and integrated power grids.
On banking, he wants genuine reciprocity: fair access for U.S. financial institutions in Canada’s protected market, in exchange for dependable Canadian access to American capital and a guarantee that U.S. policy won’t punish Canadian banks simply for being Canadian.
He also proposes a reciprocal, security-vetted worker mobility system for specific sectors — engineers, nurses, skilled trades, energy technicians, aerospace specialists, construction crews, researchers and advanced manufacturing employees — built around an employer-tied credential with background checks, wage protections, and labor-law enforcement, rather than open borders.
Hard Issues, Sondland Says, Aren’t a Reason to Split
Sondland acknowledges Canada won’t abandon its supply-management system overnight, the U.S. won’t drop its push to bring manufacturing home, and provinces and states will keep guarding their own procurement rules. He calls those normal disputes between sovereign democracies, not grounds for turning the border into what he calls an economic fault line.
His closing argument: the real choice facing both countries isn’t American dominance versus Canadian independence, but a continent that builds together versus one that slowly cedes market share and industrial capacity to rivals. Canada, he writes, doesn’t need Europe to preserve its dignity — it needs to help build a more competitive North American economy with the United States.
