EU and Canada Set to Widen the Atlantic Door for Students and Workers

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 gave no terms, no numbers and no timetable; those are expected to be published with the announcement itself. Until then the arrangement is a headline rather than a text.

Bologna reads that headline with more than passing interest. The city's university, founded in 1088 and conventionally described as the oldest in continuous operation in the Western world, draws students from across Europe and beyond, and a good part of the city's rental market, its bars and its bookshops is shaped around them. A wider route to Canada would cut both ways: more Canadians arriving for a term or a degree, and more of Bologna's own graduates able to try Toronto or Montreal with less administrative friction than a separate permit now involves.

The outbound half is the sensitive one for Italy. The country has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, an ageing population and a long record of young graduates leaving for work abroad. An arrangement that makes leaving easier is, from Rome's point of view, an ambivalent thing: a mark of openness, and a small additional pull on a shrinking demographic base.