Conrad Black: Mark Carney's EU blunder

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Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on September 17, 2026. Photo by Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP via Getty Images

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I have the painful duty of advising that I consider the basic points Prime Minister Mark Carney tried to make in his address on Sept. 27 to the European Parliament in Strasbourg profoundly mistaken. Readers should be aware that the European Parliament has no power whatsoever. The member states nominate commissioners in the different administrative fields, like cabinet ministers. The government apparatus in Brussels deluges the entire membership with decrees purporting to regulate an almost unlimited variety of activities, most of which the principal Atlantic English-speaking countries have considered unsuitable for government interference.

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The great achievement of the European Common Market, and then the European Economic Community was to reduce economic barriers between the Western European countries and to promote the peaceful and conciliatory settlement of differences between the constituent countries. This was done in lock-step with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which under unquestioned American leadership, has guaranteed the security of almost all of the member states of the evolving European Community. Eventually, President Reagan's plan to shelter the western world under what aspired to be a leak-proof anti-missile defence, confronted the Soviet Union, which was spending approximately half of its GDP on military matters, to contemplate the loss of it status as an equivalent nuclear deterrent power to the United States. The reform regime of President Gorbachev did not possess the will of Russian rulers from Peter the Great to Stalin and Khrushchev and even Brezhnev to suppress ethnic and political dissent in the polyglot, Soviet Union, and the whole Soviet concept became demoralized and simply disintegrated.

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This inspired American strategic policy of containment of Soviet communism, as well as the heavy economic assistance of the United States and proportionately Canada, under the Marshall Plan and parallel activities revived war-ravaged Western Europe as relatively free market democracies. The relevance of this to Carney's address is that he advised the European Parliament that "Freedom was won thanks to the heroism of the European resistance during the war." Freedom was in fact, won in two stages. In the first stage, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, proportionately to their populations, liberated France, and Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Norway, and occupied approximately three quarters of Germany. As many millions of Germans plodded westward ahead of the Soviet Red Army, the Western Allied armies ended up organizing the post-war government of nearly 80 per cent of the Germans.

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The Americans, British, and Canadians with modest participation from others, resurrected liberty in Western Europe. Canada's participation was especially remarkable as they were almost all volunteers and Canada, unlike Britain and the United States, had never been attacked or threatened by the Axis Powers. It was a courageous and unprovoked contribution to the pursuit of freedom throughout the world.