Is Canada’s confederal system a better model for Europe than a US-style union? Yes
It’s pretty clear that the European Union needs to evolve further in order to remain stable and retain the loyalty of its nations and citizens. That’s been obvious since long before Brexit.
In the European political discourse, there’s been a long-standing debate between people who want a Europe of Nations and those who want an “ever closer Union,” which is often called a United States of Europe, based loosely on the USA model. There are other visions as well — such as a Europe of regions of similar size and population, which would see 27 nations of hugely varying size and power displaced by hundreds of regions within some kind of United Regions of Europe.
As a European who spent much of his life in Canada until returning to Europe eleven years ago, it has long seemed to me that the Canadian Confederation might be a sensible model for the future of the European Union. I’d like to propose that this model be brought into the discourse of European policy elites and seriously considered.
Canada’s confederation has some attributes that would suit Europe’s diversity well. Canada is composed of ten Provinces of widely different size and population, ranging from tiny Prince Edward Island to mighty Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia, with a few nationally administered, sparsely populated Territories in the far North as well. The phrase ‘provincial governments’ makes it sound like these are weak and rustic entities, but nothing could be further from the reality.
The reality is that Canada’s provinces are extremely powerful entities that govern most aspects of daily life — education, health care, land use, and management of natural resources from forests and waterways to mines, energy systems, and petroleum resources, amongst other things. The federal government has relatively few formal authorities, but the ones it does have are powerful: Defense, foreign affairs, international trade relations, currency issuance, the postal system, coordination of interprovincial trade regulations, management of the federal territories, and management of ocean waters, among other things.
Provincial and federal levels have overlapping legal systems governing criminal and civil laws, with provincial and federal police forces and courts. The interplay between the federal and provincial levels is constant and subtle.
A big part of the federal government’s power derives from its spending powers. The federal and provincial governments each levy their own income taxes and value-added taxes. The federal government uses its ability to subsidise activities in areas that are actually part of the provincial governments’ jurisdiction, including health care and education, using a carrot-and-stick approach; for example, in the 1970s, the federal government passed a law requiring all provinces to adopt single-payer medical insurance systems. That led to ten separate provincial single-payer medical systems, with different rules, all of them benefiting from federal subsidies; to qualify for those subsidies, the provincial systems had to meet certain federally designed criteria.
Canada’s confederal system allows an enormous amount of provincial self-determination. The province of Québec, for example, puts a premium on making independent decisions, and is very nearly a sovereign nation; its provincial Legislature is called l’Assemblée Nationale du Québec, and most citizens of the province consider themselves Québecois, proud members of a Francophone ethnic and territorial nation, as well as contented Canadians — or vice versa: proud Canadians and contented Québecois. There’s room for both. Canadians understand nested identities.
Nested identities will work in Europe, too. There is no need whatsoever to choose between being a proud Sardegnan, a proud Italian, and a proud European, for example. It’s not only possible to be all three at the same time — it’s desirable. And if you’re an Italian who has lived in Denmark for decades, then you can be a Danish Sardegnan Italian European. We all have layered identities. Let’s cherish them. Let’s understand that being more European doesn’t mean — in any way, shape, or form — being less Italian, or less French, or less Polish. A powerful Europe means a more powerful Italy, a more powerful France, and more powerful Poland, not a less powerful Italy, or France, or Poland.
That is the direction Europe could and I believe must move toward. Rather than asking people to give up any of their identities, or stripping the subcontinent’s nations of their powers and moving them to Brussels, the European Union would be well advised to take a look at Canada’s overlapping provincial and federal jurisdictions — and its overlapping, nested identities. For me, there is no either-or in my several overlapping identities: I’m a Swiss-born German-Canadian who spent most of his childhood in a small town in Québec, heavily influenced by US culture as a member of an immigrant minority Anglophone community, before moving to Ontario and then British Columbia, before moving back to Europe and spending three years in the UK and (so far) the past eight years in Germany, the country of my earliest childhood and of all my ancestors.
If you asked me my ethnic identity, the first I’d do is ask you to modify the word so it’s plural. Identities. I’m European, I’m Canadian, I’m American, I’m German, I’m a little bit Québecois. I know from experience that more than anything, I’m first and foremost a human, like you, a child of this amazing, half-crazy, querulous tribe of talking, tool-making savannah apes that emerged in Africa some seventy thousand years ago, and somehow figured out how to make spacecraft and smartphones. There are nearly eight billion of us now, all of us descended from no more than a few hundred common ancestors that lived somewhere in the plains of east Africa before the last Ice Age. We are one extended family, all of us cousins of cousins. That’s not a poetic metaphor; it’s a statement of scientific fact. We need to learn to get along and enjoy our nested identities, to live in peace, to bring our awareness of our common heritage fully into our present awareness. We need to stop playing at the pointless game of war or at ethnic one-upmanship, and join the game of peace and global cooperation. This is what works. It works beautifully.
And Europe, in its diversity, with its terrible and grand history, can show the way, by making the European Union a confederation of powerful cooperation composed of great diversity, a symphony of dozens of distinct voices.
Canada works beautifully, as complex and constantly evolving as it is, never mind the occasional bickering between this or that agency or level of government. Here’s the Canadian-model-influenced European Union I envisage: A Europe with a powerful European Union confederal governance level that has serious spending powers, with the EU confederal government taxing and spending about 10% to 15% of GDP, looking after collective defense, a common currency, major crossboundary infrastructure projects, common technical standards, a shared commitment to global environmental conservation, common standards for civil and criminal laws, and a shared set of commercial laws within a common market in which people who start businesses only need to register once, as a European company, and no country parasitises the Union by prostituting itself as a “tax haven.” There would be systems to coax EU member nations to deliver services at comparable levels, and help them pay for that where necessary. Beyond that, the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ would leave almost everything in regional or national governance domains.
This is not so very far off from where the European Union already is, right now. Yet there are some differences — for one thing, we need a European Parliament with the right of designing and introducing legislation within EU domains of sovereignty and responsibility, in the same way the Canadian Parliament has such legislative rights and responsibilities. And we need to get over the ridiculous limitation now encumbering the EU’s ability to ever become a meaningful power in the world: the fact that the EU has no right of taxation. We also need to let go of the absurd rule against the European Central Bank financing, when necessary, public spending, as long as it stays within the hard constraint of keeping inflation well below 2% year-on-year.
The European Union confederal governance level should spend around 10% of GDP, not on obsolete agricultural subsidies, but rather on the great shared priorities of the subcontinent: Climate stability, shared defense, scientific and engineering research and development, a network of great universities, common infrastructure such as a continent-wide integrated electricity grid... There is so much to be done. Let’s stop getting in our own way, with our petty jealousies and hoary clichés, and make the reforms necessary to empower the European Union institutions within a confederal model that takes nothing away from the regional and national governance levels. Canada has done it, and so can Europe. Let’s go!
