Brussels and Ottawa Widen the Door, and Molise Counts Who Leaves

The European Union and Canada are set to announce on Friday a new strategic alliance that would include more opportunities for Canadians and Europeans to live, study and work on the opposite side of the Atlantic, The Local Italy reported on Thursday evening. The outlet published no text, no figure and no list of the fields the arrangement would cover, noting only that the announcement was scheduled for Friday. Until it is made, whether the deal goes beyond the mobility clauses that already exist between Ottawa and individual European capitals is unknown.

What is already on the books is trade. The EU and Canada's Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement has applied provisionally since 2017, removing tariffs on the great majority of goods passing between the two economies, and it says comparatively little about the movement of people. Movement has instead been handled country by country, through bilateral youth-mobility arrangements of the kind Canada operates with a number of EU member states, most of them bounded by age and by duration. A European-level alliance touching that ground would lift a matter of national discretion into a common frame.

For Molise the question is not abstract. Italy's smallest mainland region, with roughly 289,000 residents and an ageing population, has for decades sent its young out — to Rome, to Milan, to Germany, and to North America. Any widening of the exit is read here simultaneously as an opportunity for the person who leaves and a subtraction from the place that stays. That ambivalence is not a policy position; it is the arithmetic the region lives inside.