Brussels and Ottawa Widen the Atlantic Door, and Italy Counts the Leavers

The European Union and Canada are due to announce a new strategic alliance on Friday that will include more opportunities for Europeans and Canadians to live, study and work on the opposite side of the Atlantic, The Local Italy reported on Thursday. The report carried no quotas, no instruments and no timetable beyond the announcement itself. It establishes only the direction: a wider door between two labour markets.

For Italy the direction is the part that matters. The country has a birth rate near the bottom of the European table, an ageing population and a long habit of sending its young abroad for work. A route to Canada adds a destination to a list that already runs through Berlin, London and Melbourne, and it does so at a moment when the domestic labour market is short of exactly the people most likely to leave.

No wire report connects the alliance to Liguria, and this bureau will not invent one. What can be said is structural. The region's economy runs on the port, on logistics and on a tourist coast with a long season — shift work, ship's agencies, terminal gangs, seasonal staff — and those are the posts that thin out first when the young move away. A mobility clause that makes departure easier is, for a coastal region with a shallow domestic labour pool, at least as much a drain as an opportunity.