Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump.
The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa.
“While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Photo: Reuters
The pact seeks to bring Canada’s defense industry more closely into European efforts to revamp the domestic industrial base.
It opens the door for Ottawa to join common procurements under a 150 billion euros (US$174 billion) loan program backed by the EU’s central budget to boost rearmament.
It also paves the way for Canadian defense firms to tap into the scheme, although that requires the signing of a separate deal.
The EU said that the pact would deepen cooperation in areas including crisis management, defense industry collaboration, hybrid threats and military mobility.
The UK signed a similar defense partnership in May, and Australia and the EU announced they had started negotiating another one last week.
Carney said the deal with the EU would help Canada “deliver on our new requirements for capabilities more rapidly and more effectively.”
At a time of international instability, Canada is looking to diversify and strengthen its international partnerships, Carney added.
“We turn first and foremost to our most reliable allies, those who share our values of democracy, freedom and sovereignty,” he said.
Ottawa buys much of its military equipment from the US, but relations have soured under Trump, who has repeatedly called for Canada to become the 51st US state and announced tariffs on its exports.
The EU is Canada’s second-biggest commercial partner. Bilateral trade in goods was 75.6 billion euros last year, up 64 percent since 2017, when a free-trade agreement provisionally entered into force.
Beijing yesterday dismissed as “groundless speculation” a report that said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) was the target of a Chinese spy plot. The article by the New York Times, published on Thursday, said that US intelligence officials concluded that a Chinese executive linked to a Singapore-based data center company had been funneling information to Beijing. “The report in question is based on groundless speculation and is nothing more than an attempt to smear China,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun (郭嘉昆) told a regular briefing. China is in a race for tech dominance with the US, which restricts the export
Long dubbed an “air-conditioned nation,” Singapore is experimenting with cooling alternatives from chilled beams to “passive displacement” to curb its thirst for energy-guzzling air-conditioning. The city-state has the highest per-capita air-conditioner ownership rate in Southeast Asia, with about 99 percent of private residences equipped with cooling units. Singapore’s local building sector accounts for one-fifth of its emissions, while cooling itself accounts for 40 to 60 percent of a building’s energy consumption, according to studies. A stroll down Orchard Road highlights that dependence. Shoppers are greeted by blasts of cool air that waft into the street as doors swing open — a major draw
Ethiopian online influencers are pushing for their government to invade neighboring Eritrea and seize access to the sea, following its success against rebel and Eritrean forces in the past few weeks. The Ethiopian army has advanced right up to the border after repelling an offensive by rebels in the northern Tigray State who were supported by Eritrean troops. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has repeatedly said that securing a base on the Red Sea is a vital national objective for Ethiopia, which lost its coastline when Eritrea gained independence in 1993. Some online influencers say that the opportunity to invade has arrived. “The time
33 MISSING: The unprecedented number of empty seats at the fifth plenum, an annual gathering of top officials, serve as a symbol of the extent of the purges under Xi Jinping China expelled a record number of officials from the Chinese Communist party (CCP) as it concluded a major political gathering, which saw an unprecedented number of empty seats indicating the scale of the purges under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). A record 33 members were expelled at this week’s fifth plenum, a gathering of top officials that takes place roughly once a year. Just 279 of the full and alternate members of the CCP’s Central Committee attended this week’s gathering, compared with the 376 originally named as members in 2022. That means that more than 25 percent of the original cohort were
RSS