Carl Mortished is a Canadian financial journalist based in London.
What's a Canadian tourist to do? The waiter recites the menu du jour but you don't like the fishy starter and you want to swap soup for salad. Sorry, says the maitre d'hotel with his best sneer, your holiday package does not include dinner à la carte.
That sums up the dilemma facing Ottawa in its latest tiff with Brussels over immigration. Canadians and Americans currently enjoy visa-free travel to the European Union, but the European Commission would like to end that privilege because North Americans won't return the favour in full.
Most EU citizens breeze through Canadian airports as they wave their wine-red passports, but in Ottawa's view, some Europeans are more equal than others. Currently, Bulgarians and Romanians must still apply for visas before they visit Canada and U.S. immigration extends that requirement to include Poland, Croatia and Cyprus.
Non, says the European Commission, you cannot deal with Europe à la carte. Only Britain and Ireland lie outside the EU's fixed immigration menu. The deadline for Canada and the United States to remove the discriminatory measures expired Today (Tuesday) but faced with continued North American intransigence, a college of European Commissioners delayed until July 12, the decision to bite back with retaliatory visa requirements for Americans and Canadians. There will be talks, but Canada refuses to treat the EU as one big happy and united family and that is the problem.
The delay for more talks means that tour operators and travel agents won't need to fret about summer holiday chaos over immigration but you might think the EU cannot afford to discourage Canadian tourist dollars, not to mention U.S. ones. After November's terrorist carnage, central Paris is suffering from a noticeable tourism downturn. France, Italy, Germany and Spain are among the top 10 destinations for Canadians, who spent $1.5-billion in France in 2013. Bulgaria and Romania don't feature in any must-see list of cool holidays for Canadians, which raises the question of why Ottawa wants to spoil the fun by appearing unwelcoming to Bulgarians and Romanians.
If you ask Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to justify their behaviour, you will get a grab bag of reasons why visas are required for any particular nationality. These include travel document security, public safety, border management, human rights, migration and immigration issues.
According to IRCC, neither Bulgaria or Romania qualify for visa waiver and while they cite no specific concern, the issue is migration and immigration. Apparently, a large percentage of Bulgarians and Romanians overstay their welcome in Canada and Ottawa wants to keep tabs on them. Add to the mix the current migration crisis in the Balkans and you can see why there is little appetite to open the door further.
But there can be no real appetite in Brussels for the threatened tit-for-tat response. It's not just the inevitable fury from Paris and Rome over the prospect of empty restaurants and hotels as Americans begin to cut short their great European tours at the White Cliffs of Dover.
The visa row exposes a much bigger running sore, which is the great folly of the EU's endless drive for expansion and greater integration. Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, but unlike previous EU enlargements, their accession was not a smooth passage. Anxiety about Bulgarian criminal gangs was combined with concern about a possible mass migration of Roma to Western Europe. For the first time, other EU states were allowed to impose transitional measures, requiring work visas for Romanians and Bulgarians. These finally expired in 2014 and now the EU wants North Americans to finally accept that Bulgarians and Romanians are true Europeans.
There is no doubt the two former communist countries have been transformed by the EU, from grindingly poor and brutalized vassal states to something much more civilized. The much-maligned architects of EU statehood in Brussels should be proud of this achievement and the world should be grateful for what was done.
What's more difficult for Brussels to achieve is wide recognition that the EU is more than an association of states but a sovereign entity that speaks for all its members. It's unlikely that IRCC officials or U.S. Homeland Security are thinking deeply about the meaning of the European Union when they give Romanian tourists a hard stare. They just want to see a return air ticket.
However, for the European Commission, the crisis at Europe's southeastern border with Turkey and the ensuing political squabble between Germany and its neighbours about Muslim immigration has revealed the lack of common agreement over what the EU means and what it is for.
Tellingly, the biggest fan of EU expansion has always been Britain, the semi-detached pragmatist that always opts out of greater integration. It was prime minister Margaret Thatcher who argued in favour of rapid accession for former Soviet bloc states and over the past decade, Britain has been most vocal in supporting more Balkan and even Turkish membership.
Britain's support for an enlarged EU might be seen as cynical or just consistent with its view that the EU is no more than a trading club with a few extra bells and whistles. The old guard, notably France, has been highly suspicious of enlargement (and probably rightly so), fearing the problems of integrating so many different cultures.
The political argument over Europe's purpose and its future is now fully engaged and is being fought on many fronts – in riots on the Macedonian border, in arguments over Greek sovereign debt in the European Central Bank. In June, it will be fought at the polls, in a British vote on whether to remain in the union.
The EU's future is not yet a live issue in Canadian immigration queues, but it's not impossible to see how it might become so.