Brexit: A Critical Juncture for Canada’s Transatlantic Relations?

This article assesses how Brexit—the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU)—has impacted Canada’s relations with its European partners. Based on a historical institutionalist framework, the article reviews three key dimensions of Brexit: economic disintegration, political differentiation, and populist mobilization. In each dimension, it assesses whether Brexit constituted a critical juncture for Canada’s transatlantic relations—meaning that it increased institutional contingency—and then reviews which forms of change occurred since the 2016 referendum. The analysis shows that Brexit did indeed give rise to public debates about new directions in Canada-UK and Canada-EU relations. However, the changes that unfolded in the years after Brexit remained incremental and relatively subtle. In the economic dimension, a limited set of new Canada-UK institutions were added without undermining Canada-EU institutions. In the political dimension, institutional configurations remained stable. In the populist dimension, an increased politicization of transatlantic relations in the discourse of Canadian political parties did not have broader societal resonance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]