Brussels and Ottawa Prepare a Wider Door for Work and Study

The European Union and Canada are expected to announce on Friday a new strategic alliance that would widen opportunities for Canadians and Europeans to live, study and work on the other side of the Atlantic. The Local Italy, reporting the planned announcement, said the arrangement would create more such openings in both directions. No text of the agreement had been published.

Brussels and Ottawa are not starting from nothing. The two have a free-trade agreement, CETA, in provisional application, and a strategic partnership agreement that predates it. What is new in Friday's expected announcement is the movement of people rather than goods, a field in which the Union's external arrangements have generally been narrow and negotiated country by country.

For Italy the question is demographic as much as economic. The country's population is roughly 59 million and ageing, with a low birth rate and a steady emigration of the young. A wider legal route to Canada is therefore both an opportunity for Italian graduates and, potentially, one more channel through which a thinning population leaves.