The leadership of Belgium’s French-speaking community said on Thursday it would not give its authorization to the federal government to approve the EU-Canada trade deal, effectively threatening to capsize the entire agreement.
Unless Belgium’s federal government can devise an imaginative compromise, the country’s francophone Wallonia-Brussels assembly will have effectively torpedoed an agreement seen as a critical to the survival of the European Commission’s broader trade policy.
On Wednesday, the regional parliament of Brussels-Wallonia passed a non-binding resolution that the region’s government should not accept the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which has been negotiated over the last seven years between the EU and Canada. [...]
The Belgian veto starkly reveals the dangers of the Canadian model, as any one of the EU’s 37 national and regional assemblies would be able to veto a trade agreement between Brussels and the U.K. over issues such as migration.
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