Diplomatic summits are often reported as theatre, but the Montreal summit has an economic base that can be measured, and the measurement is striking: trade in goods and services between the European Union and Canada reached roughly 130 billion euros in 2025, an increase of more than 80 percent compared with 2016, according to the European Council’s account of the summit. That figure is the context for everything else announced on October 30, from digital trade to minerals financing, because an alliance built on 130 billion euros of annual exchange is not a gesture; it is a relationship with firms, jobs and supply chains behind it.
The growth since 2016 reflects the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which eliminates tariffs on 98 percent of traded goods, and the deepening of services, investment and regulatory cooperation since. The Montreal package extends that base in specific directions: a concluded digital trade agreement to make online transactions faster and cheaper, a completed competition agreement, a framework for European Investment Bank financing of Canadian critical mineral projects, and cooperation on artificial intelligence, satellite connectivity and positioning. Each item addresses a friction in the existing 130 billion euro relationship, rather than inventing a new one from scratch.
Minerals as the growth edge
Critical minerals are the fastest growing edge of the relationship. EU imports of Canadian critical raw materials, including lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite, rose 62 percent in 2025 to 3.3 billion euros, a growth rate that explains why minerals financing, rather than minerals rhetoric, was a summit priority. The Investment Bank framework is designed to turn European demand into financed Canadian projects, and Canada’s announcement of a 1.6 billion Canadian dollar investment in the AI firm Cohere, alongside access to European supercomputing through the high performance computing undertaking, shows the same logic applied to technology: supply the inputs, finance the projects, and share the infrastructure.
Financial services are the quieter growth story. TD Economics has named pension funds and asset managers among the institutions placed to finance Europe’s energy, defence and critical mineral build out, and closer cooperation on licensing and supervision could reduce duplicate compliance for firms operating on both sides of the Atlantic. The European Council account of the summit records trade and regulatory cooperation as the first of six cooperation areas, and the financial services dimension, less headline grabbing than a summit label, may prove more durable than the label debate itself.
What 130 billion does not prove
A large trade figure does not by itself prove that deeper association will work. Trade can grow under existing agreements without a new institutional label, and the summit’s most ambitious element, an ever closer association to be defined by 2027, remains unresolved precisely because its benefits are harder to quantify than a trade total. Canada has not become an EU member, and the declaration does not grant it membership of any kind. The partners agreed to define the concept by 2027, with parliamentary approval required in Canada for any enhanced partnership, and that negotiation will test whether institutional closeness adds value beyond what trade growth already delivers.
The honest verdict is therefore twofold. The economic relationship is large, growing and diversified, from minerals to digital trade to finance, and the Montreal package gives it practical extensions that businesses can use. The institutional question, what ever closer association actually means, is still open, and its answer will determine whether Montreal is remembered as a trade summit with a diplomatic flourish or as the moment Canada and the EU began a genuinely new kind of partnership. The 130 billion euros is the base. The 2027 definition is the test.
