Nine Years of CETA, One Profession Opened: Quebec's 81 Say How

Nine years after CETA took effect, the trade pact has opened exactly one occupation to mutual recognition — architects, whose deal finally entered into force on December 18, 2025. Quebec's parallel agreement with France covers 81 professions, trades and functions, and by 2024 France's engineering accreditation body had counted 9,859 people trained in France or Quebec who crossed the Atlantic to practise. That gap is the backdrop to today's Canada-EU Summit in Montreal, where Prime Minister Mark Carney hosts European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa for the most important such meeting in memory.

The summit is meant to settle what Carney's "Alliance for the Future" — built on Canada's associate membership in the bloc — will actually do. In Strasbourg in September, Carney proposed letting young people live, work and study where they want on either side of the Atlantic. A draft communiqué seen by The Globe and Mail commits to negotiations on Canada joining Erasmus+, and a senior Canadian official says the talks include labour mobility. Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada's ambassador to the EU, has ruled out free movement of labour in favour of "specialized areas."

What does the Quebec-France deal prove?

It began on October 17, 2008, when Premier Jean Charest and President Nicolas Sarkozy signed the mutual recognition of professional qualifications at the Canada-EU summit in Québec City, the same day Stephen Harper, Sarkozy and José Manuel Barroso agreed to pursue what became CETA. Charest had pitched the transatlantic deal at Davos in 2007, partly as a way to fill jobs for labour-starved employers. Last month he told the Globe that European countries "represent a great pool of talent from which we can recruit."

The numbers since:

• 81 professions, trades and functions covered by recognition rather than diploma equivalence, a principle modelled on an EU directive.
• Nearly 700 French-trained engineers practising in Quebec among the 9,859 cross-Atlantic professionals counted by 2024.
• 134 applicants from France admitted by the nurses' order on a temporary basis in 2024-25 alone.

Recognition did not come from regulators' goodwill. Quebec's complaints commissioner has examined grievances that the engineers' and nurses' orders added conditions the accord never contemplated, and French-trained doctors still complete a 12-week evaluative internship before practising. A government that needed workers pushed its professional orders and kept pushing.

Why did CETA deliver so little?

CETA's credential chapter obliges Canada and the EU only to encourage authorities to bring forward joint recommendations. Architects did, in May 2018. By March 2022 the talks had reached a ninth round, with provinces and territories sitting in as observers and residency the last open issue. The deal took effect seven and a half years after architects asked. Mark Camilleri wrote in Policy in February, and the Globe's Mark Rendell confirmed in September, that no other field had followed. The architects' deal is the example Wilkinson cites.

A Lisbon architect moving to Vancouver still needs twelve years of education, training and practice — four of them on the job — plus EU citizenship or permanent residency, a 10-hour course on Canadian practice, filing through the Ordre des architectes du Québec and registration in British Columbia. One occupation, against Quebec's 81.

Sceptics call Quebec and France a special case: a shared language, legal tradition and four centuries of history, against an EU of 27 regulatory systems in 24 official languages, where governments with their own shortages have little reason to back a scheme sending nine professionals west for every one heading east. But the argument is dated. On September 15 the European Commission proposed common standards for judging credentials earned outside the Union, cutting average waits from 14 months to four. The EU's new talent pool law lists mutual recognition arrangements as a way to have qualifications accepted. Europe is writing into law what CETA left voluntary.

What does this change for a worker today?

Ask Lucie Cézar. The French caregiver moved from France to Lévis, Quebec, in August 2023 with her partner and two children, retrained for two years as a nursing assistant, graduated in February 2026, passed her certification exams and took evening shifts at a long-term care centre in Saint-Apollinaire. In late July, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada refused her post-graduation work permit because, as Le Soleil reported, the file lacked a French test result — she is French, and Quebec is short of nursing assistants, as La Presse noted. "So we stay here," she told the paper in August, "and we wait."

Her case shows the two-level trap: licensing belongs to the provinces, permission to work belongs to Ottawa, and settling one without the other leaves people licensed but unable to work, or allowed to work but unlicensed. Any deal needs both approvals. The Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act, in force since January 1, now treats anyone certified in one province as qualified in the rest — Cézar's Quebec certification could in principle be accepted in Calgary — but without a work permit she could not use it there either. British Columbia bars most Canadian-experience requirements across the 18 regulators its act covers. Budget 2025 set aside $97 million over five years for a Foreign Credential Recognition Action Fund, drawn from existing departmental resources.

The Globe's editorial board has told Canadians "fantasizing about a chic apartment on the Seine" not to get too excited; immigration sensitivities will keep any visa loosening limited. Roland Paris of the University of Ottawa said this month that what the partnership is called matters less than how it functions. Carney and von der Leyen could start by naming engineers, nurses and accountants as the first covered professions, giving the CETA committee until the 2027 summit — the date the draft sets for defining associate membership — to settle terms, and pairing every recognized credential with a federal work permit. Without that pairing, the alliance will keep producing cases like Ms. Cézar's.