Canada is the European Union’s 11th most important trade partner.
The value of EU exports to Canada rose to nearly $42 Billion dollars in 2007. A roughly equivilent amount of Canadian exports entered the EU during the same period.
Value-added products such as machinery, transport equipment and chemicals made up 32% of the EU's imports from Canada. An additional 17.6 % of bilateral trade consisted of agricultural or energy-related products, as well, trade in services, particularly travel and transportation, is a growing area in the trade relationship.
Investment is also a particularly strong feature, with Canada as the third largest investor in the EU.
In 1976, Canada and the EU signed the first ever
Framework Agreement for Commercial and Economic Cooperation between the EU and an industrialized country. The
1990 Transatlantic Declaration built on this agreement.
The EU and Canada meet in annual EU-Canada summits.
In addition, senior European Commission and Canadian Federal Government officials meet once a year in the Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) to review the full range of issues relating to EU-Canada economic and trade relations.
The EU and Canada have signed a number of bilateral agreements designed to facilitate closer trade. These include agreements on cooperation between EU and Canadian customs administrators (1997), to combat fraud and to facilitate trade, and a Veterinary Agreement (1999) aiming to improve bilateral trade in live animals and animal products. A Wine and Spirits Agreement was signed in 2003.
Canada has recently expressed interest in a wider FTA (Free Trade Agreement) type agreement with the EU, and at their Summit in June 2007 the parties agreed to undertake a Joint Study to examine the existing barriers -
especially non-tariff barriers - to the flow of goods, services and capital between the EU and Canada, and to estimate the potential benefits of removing such barriers.
At their
Summit on October 17, the EU and Canada agreed to "work together to define the scope of a deepened economic agreement and to establish the critical points for its successful conclusion".
During all of this the EU has continued to allow fishing vessels from its member nations to sail across the Atlantic in order to commercially harvest threatened fish stocks on the fringes of Canada’s 200-mile limit. They’ve done this while ensuring that harmful trade tariffs imposed against Atlantic Canadian shrimp exports to the EU remain in place.
On Monday, March 2, 2009, the European Union voted in favor of a complete ban on all humanely and harvest seal products from a fully sustainable Canadian seal harvest, a move that is almost sure to kill the industry and severely impact on low income families in rural Atlantic Canada.
The federal government of Canada, including Fisheries Minister Gail Shea, has since side stepped any questions put to them about imposing trade sanctions against the EU over their actions.
In the wake of this recent actions by the EU, new trade talks between the EU and Canada are still slated to proceed as planned.
