In a moment that would have seemed implausible a decade ago, the European Union has extended toward Canada an offer of associate membership — a category that has never before existed within the bloc's institutional architecture. The gesture reflects a quiet but consequential realignment: as North American trade relations grow more volatile under the current American administration, both Ottawa and Brussels appear to be recalculating where their deepest interests lie. Trump's public dismissal of the arrangement as laughable may, in the long arc of history, be remembered less as a rebuttal than