1. 🇨🇦 CARNEY DITCHES HIS COUNTRY FOR EU

As Canada’s trade war with the United States intensifies, Prime Minister Mark Carney is skipping town. Rather than addressing the crisis at home, Carney is soon flying to Strasbourg to deliver a speech to the European Parliament.

“In these challenging times, strengthening our relationships across the world is vital,” the European Commission said in a statement.

But the visit comes as USMCA negotiations heat up, talks that were already unraveling over Canada’s failure to meet its own obligations, including the flow of illicit cigarettes and other items across the northern border. And now Carney is turning to the EU?

Canadian Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman put it perfectly in a post on X explaining that if Canada is truly under attack, Carney’s place is in Ottawa, not Strasbourg. The question isn’t whether Canada needs allies; it’s why Carney seems more comfortable addressing Europe’s parliament than his own.

2. 🇳🇴 NORWAY REJECTS EU DRILLING BAN

Norway’s Energy Minister Terje Aasland made clear that Oslo will press ahead with oil and gas development in the Arctic Barents Sea, regardless of EU pressure for a moratorium on new Arctic hydrocarbon extraction.

Reuters reports:

Aasland believes Norway’s arguments are being heard in Brussels, but added that it was the country’s sovereign right to develop the Barents Sea resources even if the EU continued to support a moratorium. “We would develop these areas, and then it will be up to the EU whether they should have a moratorium on buying that gas or oil,” Aasland said.

Norwegian officials once championed the idea of their country serving as Europe’s “green battery,” a clean-energy anchor justifying new power interconnectors with Britain and Germany. Aasland himself called that vision “a flawed idea,” arguing Norway alone cannot balance the European power market. Green ideology met energy reality, and reality won.

Norway currently supplies around 30% of gas consumed across the EU and UK. Official forecasts show a sharp production drop after 2030 without new Barents Sea developments. Equinor CEO Anders Opedal made the stakes plain: if Europe won’t buy Arctic gas, global markets will. “The only thing that will suffer from this is actually European security,” he told Reuters. Brussels should be listening.

EVEN EUROPEANS ARE FED UP WITH THE DMA

Since President Trump took office, he has fought to protect American companies from the EU’s controversial digital regulations. Now, with the negative effects of Brussels’ regulations beginning to trickle down to its own populace, an unlikely ally for the US has emerged: Europeans themselves.

In a recent op-ed published in the National Interest, Portuguese public policy expert Cláudia Nunes argues that the EU’s Digital Markets Act was never about consumer protection. Rather, the regulation’s goal was to tilt the playing field against American tech companies that Brussels lacks the ability to replicate.

Given the higher prices and degraded digital experience Europeans have endured under the DMA, it should come as no surprise that the Europeans themselves have begun to turn against the regulations targeting American tech companies.

For one, the DMA has caused Europeans to pay more for the same services as US firms have been forced to offload compliance costs onto EU customers to offset additional expenses from the regulation.

The DMA has also had a devastating impact on app performance, with a recent survey of 5,000 Europeans finding the DMA has led to a substantial decline in online map and search engine functions. The same survey also revealed that a majority of Europeans would like services to be restored to their pre-DMA state, suggesting just how widely the negative impacts have been felt across the continent.

Even when disregarding the negative toll the regulations have had on EU users, Europeans are nonetheless principally opposed to the trade-offs which the DMA puts in place. 81% of Europeans oppose any regulation that would force search engines to elevate scammer’s content, and 78% of Europeans want platforms to continue filtering spam even if it affects traffic to certain sites. Yet, under the DMA, US companies are forced to do the opposite.

With President Trump eager to go to bat yet again for US firms, frustration among Europeans is not the only thing Brussels will have to manage moving forward. President Trump and his Administration have already launched a Section 301 investigation and threatened substantial tariffs, ensuring that the next two years will be turbulent for Brussels unless they change course.