With a US president who talks of making Canada the 51st state, its leader in Europe where it’s not quite the EU’s 28th state on offer, but something the president of the European Commission is calling ‘associate membership’. We’ll ask what that means, how it differs from the close status afforded to the likes of Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and the UK which Carney’s also visiting ahead of his own Strasbourg speech Thursday before the European Parliament.
The headline is using ‘state’ in it’s more universal sense which is synonymous with how ‘country’ is used. State in the sense implied when Louis XIV (apocryphally) said, “L’etat, c’est moi,” rather than in the sense of American subnational divisions.
Obviously it’s also calling back to the ‘51st state’ rhetoric coming out of the US, but ‘state’ does work here regardless.