Blame Canada

Book says Canada was a template for the EU project.

Is Canada laying claim to Jean Monnet and his ideas of European integration?

A book published there suggests that Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European project, drew for inspiration on his time spent in western Canada between 1907 and 1914.

As an 18-year-old, the Frenchman was sent to Canada to promote his family’s Monnet cognac to suppliers and retailers.

Trygve Ugland, a professor from Bishop’s University, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, told a Brussels audience at Canada’s mission to the EU that Monnet’s travels in Canada had a “formative influence on his theories”.

Ugland, himself a Norwegian migrant to the ‘new world’, said Monnet was inspired by the optimistic pioneer spirit that he encountered in Canada. The academic said Monnet was astonished to find that German, French, British and other immigrants from Europe were able to get along to build a common future in a new country.

Ugland hopes his research, which involved immersion in Monnet’s memoirs, will shed light on what has been a less-examined part of the life of the Frenchman, who headed France’s general planning commission after the Second World War and became the first president of the European Coal and Steel Community’s high authority, the forerunner of the European Commission.

This bid by Canadian diplomats to claim credit for shaping one of the EU’s founding fathers is a bold one. If the current EU-Canada negotiations on free trade are ever concluded, perhaps they should be toasted in Monnet cognac.

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