01-02 The Future

I will never forget the pocket full of copper and silver after visiting a dozen European countries from Holland to Lichtenstein and from Northern Ireland to Italy. It was 1954, and most of that small change eventually became gifts to my grandchildren.
The common currency, the Euro, a product of the EU, was supposed to eliminate that confusion and all the swings in currency values across Europe.
But keeping nations like Greece in the EU using the Euro is expensive. They would be better off with their own currency and fewer subsidies from the EU. Cheaper Greek money would attract tourists and tourist dollars.
Today with so many developing nations in the EU, the tax burden keeping the EU solvent is becoming a more significant challenge every day. Apparently, the more developed countries of the EU in the west send something like $40 billion US to EU members of the East.
And now with Britain pulling out of the EU, budget pressures are going to become even more difficult.
But that only explains half the problems facing Europe. President Trump is right to complain that Europe does not pay its full share to fund its own defence, which is the financing of NATO or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Essentially the US subsidizes Europe, and Europe’s high standard of living.
If I was just looking at the future of Europe from an economic perspective, I would think Europe would be better off abandoning the Euro and the concept of the common currency. Not everyone knows that only 19 of the 28 members of the EU actually use the Euro. They could become one big free trade area.
But the problems of Europe run deeper. There are the 23,000 laws the European parliament has passed plus all the regulations that go with those laws. The EU is a massively expensive system to administer.
Then the question arises as to the degree to which Europeans respect the European Parliament compared to their own institutions. The reality? Few European laws are properly enforced.
And then there is the rivalry between the use of the English and French languages. And on this issue, French is losing out to Mandarin as a global language. English is number one in usage globally thanks not to Britain, but the dominance of America.
So the problems of Europe are a lot more complicated than a few wealthy nations supporting a lot of poorer nations.
But what is most interesting is that Europe is going to get stronger, not weaker. And what will unite them is not European leadership, but President Trump of the United States.
When it comes to American-EU relations, nothing the US president says can be believed, and certainly the US pledge to come to the aid of its NATO partners in a crisis also cannot be believed.
The European Union or EU was created after WW2 to prevent WW3. But the reality is that Europe will need to become a force of its own. Call it what it is–the German Empire. And united because of a fear that the US is no longer a partner or even a trusted ally, but a rival.
Canada is just a player on the fringe of Europe but lucky to have concluded a new trade and investment arrangement through CETA, the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement. It will undoubtedly facilitate an increase in both trade and investment between Canada and Europe.
But more important than trade, Canada is a respected force in Europe because of its French language and sensitivity to the French culture. And in the European Parliament in Brussels, we are dealing with French as the official language.