MONTREAL — Canada embraced the European Union’s offer of “associate membership” after a two-day summit at which Brussels and Ottawa gave themselves until next June to work out what their new relationship will look like.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s endorsement of the proposal by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen followed weeks of hesitation, a hostile response from U.S. President Donald Trump and pushback from EU heavyweight Germany.

“In the coming months, we will determine the full substance, scale, and scope of this new form of membership,” Carney told a press conference on Friday at the end of the two-day summit at the Port of Montreal. 

“Today, we move towards associate membership for Canada,” Carney said, describing it as “the deepest possible partnership short of accession.”

The two sides have set a June 2027 deadline to determine the terms and boundaries of their intensifying relationship — an alliance that comes with a payment schedule. Carney danced around a question pressing him on how much associate membership will cost the Canadian public.

“We don’t view this as paying, personally,” Carney said, stressing the alliance as a “positive” project.

Von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa, standing either side of Carney, presented the experiment as a necessary survival strategy to thrive in an increasingly dangerous world.

“The concept of an associate member is uncharted territory but we have the ambition, trust and creativity to shape it together,” Von der Leyen told reporters. “To be crystal clear, this is not a partnership against anybody, but for our common strength.”

Canadian government officials who spoke to reporters after the press conference confirmed legislation won’t be necessary to legitimize Canada’s EU associate membership status.

“Our relationship is so special that we want to create something new — to go beyond a simple association, everything short of a full EU membership,” said Costa, pitching a new model for non-European countries to integrate more closely with the bloc. “Our association will be the closest, deepest and most unique of its kind.”

Irritants persist

Despite the upbeat rhetoric, some longstanding trade disputes remained unresolved after the summit.

Carney told reporters the two sides had reached an agreement on carveouts from a landmark EU anti-deforestation law, but Canadian government officials subsequently walked back his assertion.

The issue remains part of ongoing trade discussions, one official said, noting progress in addressing what Canada views as flaws in the legislation. The officials were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic and trade negotiations.

Another irritant has been whether Canada would qualify for “Made in Europe” status under the EU’s Industrial Accelerator Act, a landmark measure that would seek to channel public procurement spending in sectors ranging from green energy to automotive toward locally produced goods. 

Von der Leyen said the regulation proposed earlier this year by the Commission foresaw including Canada as a free-trade partner, but added that it was now subject to review by EU lawmakers and governments.

“The Industrial Accelerator Act has been proposed by the Commission to include all countries with whom we have free-trade agreements. So automatically Canada would be in,” she said in response to a question. 

“Of course now the proposal has to go through the co-legislative process. But our proposal is very clear in including Canada.”

Despite months of preparations, the summit itself was chaotic, with agenda details confirmed at short notice and bilateral meetings split between two locations. The informal arrangements were intended to encourage more face time between EU commissioners and Canadian ministers, who are set to see much more of each other.

Canadian ministers have been invited to attend more meetings with their EU counterparts as part of a plan to deepen political alignment. Recent participation by Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand and International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu in informal EU meetings has served as a trial run.

Carney himself is expected in Dublin in two weeks, having accepted Costa’s invitation to join an informal European Council meeting.

For decades, Spain’s high-speed rail network had been a source of national pride, symbolizing the country’s rapid modernization and its rise among Europe’s leading economies.

But Wednesday’s deadly train disaster — following another mass-casualty rail crash in January — is turning that legacy into a political liability and putting the state of the railways at the center of the campaign ahead of the Nov. 29 snap election.

“The deaths of more than 100 people in two train accidents in the span of eight months raise serious questions about the integrity of the railway system,” opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo said Thursday, adding that Spaniards “deserve answers.”

Those answers are hard to find. Experts point to human error, maintenance issues, austerity and EU-level rail safety reform as all having played their part in the deaths of at least 69 people near Toledo on Wednesday.

Spain’s transport ministry says the preliminary investigation points to a chain of failures. After a computer malfunction knocked out the German-made signaling system installed in 1992, railway network officials took control and authorized a train to proceed along a track where another had stopped, causing the deadly collision.

Jaime Tamarit, a former director of a European railway-signaling certification laboratory who helped oversee the development of the pan-European system meant to prevent railway accidents, said the system failure revealed the grave state of Spain’s high-speed rail network.

“The whole point of a train-protection system is to guard against human error,” he said, adding that the failure of such a critical mechanism suggested, “the infrastructure is in a terrible state.” 

Investment in Spain’s railways plunged during the financial crisis and subsequent austerity years. Although spending has since recovered, it remains well below its pre-crisis level in real terms.

Between 2018 and 2022, Spain allocated an average of €1.5 billion a year to high-speed rail —more than France or Germany — but most of that money went toward new infrastructure. Maintenance, renewals and upgrades accounted for about 16% of Spain’s high-speed rail spending, compared with 34% to 39% in France, Germany and Italy, according to European Commission data.

“If you have more train lines, you need more staff, and to spend more on maintenance,” Tamarit said.

The safety expert attributed the apparent lack of investment to political prioritization that values flashy new construction over maintaining existing infrastructure. “Maintenance is vital — but also politically invisible,” he lamented.

Adif, Spain’s railway infrastructure manager, has repeatedly defended the adequacy of its maintenance regime and insists it has always complied with safety requirements. The state-owned company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Unanswered questions

Ana Miranda, a European Parliament lawmaker from Galicia’s nationalist BNG party, accused Spanish authorities of failing to learn from past rail disasters, drawing parallels between Wednesday’s crash near Toledo and the 2013 Angrois disaster in Galicia, which killed 80 people and injured 152.

“The Angrois accident is happening again,” she said, arguing that the government of then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had focused on human error while failing to adequately address the technical and systemic issues that may have contributed to the disaster.

“In the Angrois case they singled out the driver, and now they’re trying to do the same with the control workers,” Miranda said. “We need to get to the root of the causes, and that requires investigations.”

The EU Agency for Railways reached a similar conclusion in 2016, when it issued a report finding the investigation into the Angrois disaster had not met the required standards of independence and recommended a new inquiry. The European Commission subsequently launched infringement proceedings over wider shortcomings in Spain’s railway safety oversight.

Miranda said authorities had also failed to conduct a sufficiently rigorous inquiry into January’s Adamuz crash, which killed 46 people. An independent technical investigator assisting the probe has alleged that Adif altered accident reports, while questions have also emerged over documentation relating to inspections of track welds on the stretch where the crash occurred.

Adif denies wrongdoing and says it has cooperated with the judicial investigation.

For Miranda, the repeated controversies point to a failure spanning successive governments. She accused the country’s two dominant parties — the center-right People’s Party, which was in power at the time of the Angrois crash, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s center-left Socialists, who have governed Spain since 2018 — of maintaining a “pact of silence on high-speed rail.”

“They had enough time to implement rules,” she said. “How easy is it to blame the worker when nothing has been done to change things?”

Europe’s slow transition to safer railways

Wednesday’s crash highlights a wider European challenge: replacing fragmented national signaling systems with modern technology while maintaining aging infrastructure. 

The trains involved in the deadly collision in Toledo were not using ERTMS, the European Union’s standard rail-signaling system, which can automatically brake trains that exceed permitted speeds or fail to obey signals.

Spain’s post-pandemic recovery plan included investments to modernize railway signaling and traffic control, including the deployment of ERTMS. The Madrid–Seville line was also due to be equipped with the system under a separate signaling-renewal project authorized in 2020, but the upgrade remains incomplete.

Investigators have yet to determine whether ERTMS would have made a difference in Wednesday’s crash.

Deployment of the latest railway safety technology across Europe remains far behind schedule. By the end of 2024, European Train Control System technology — the core signaling component of ERTMS — was operational on only about 12,400 kilometers of track, roughly 10% of the EU’s trans-European transport network, according to the European Union Agency for Railways.

National plans aim to expand coverage to 40,000 kilometers by 2030, out of roughly 63,000 kilometers the EU wants equipped across the bloc. But an EU official said they doubted even that target would be met on time.

Politics has been part of the problem, the official said, with countries having “different reasons for not adopting the system” and Brussels allowing national systems to remain in place for years. “It was only in 2024 when we actually said ERTMS is going to be the single European system,” the official added.

The EU aims to have ERTMS installed on 57% of its main rail corridors by 2030 — but that target increasingly seems out of reach. 

Rail lobbies in Brussels say funding for signaling and network upgrades is insufficient. But these concerns have only sharpened after the Irish presidency of the Council of the EU proposed cutting the Connecting Europe Facility by 14% from the Commission’s original proposal in its latest negotiating document for the bloc’s next seven-year budget.

Further safety improvements could be undermined by cuts to EU research programs. Indeed, a draft of the new Horizon Europe structure under the next long-term budget, seen by POLITICO, could cut rail research entirely — even though that research is what underpins the ERTMS blueprints the industry will have to adopt.

The official added that companies won’t expand production without knowing that “there are contracts for next year.”

Despite the obstacles, the European Commission is trying to accelerate the rollout of the safety mechanisms.

Last September, industry and policymakers gathered in Brussels to discuss an “ERTMS Deal” aimed at standardizing technical requirements, speeding up approvals and encouraging deployment through EU funding. 

But the technical blueprint underpinning the plan is still being developed, with an initial batch of results expected by the end of 2027 and some elements requiring further testing and validation. 

That leaves little time before the EU’s 2030 deployment targets. For an industry seeking to expand production, the official said, the uncertainty itself is an obstacle for companies that ultimately need to know “there are contracts for next year.”

Delays in improving rail safety remain a challenge across Europe. The deadly crash on the line between Madrid and Seville is a stark reminder that the stakes of getting those improvements right are measured in human lives.