In Ankara on October 22, Canada and Turkiye gave their relationship a new name and a timetable. Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a strategic partnership, backed by a three-year action plan. The first round of free-trade talks is due in the Turkish capital next month.
As Al Jazeera reported, Carney’s two-day visit comes as Canada seeks to reduce its dependence on the United States. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, Canada’s retaliatory measures and Trump’s statements questioning Canadian sovereignty have given Ottawa’s search for other partners an urgency beyond the usual diplomatic promise of more commerce.
This is the first bilateral visit to Turkiye by a Canadian prime minister. Carney had already travelled to Ankara in July for the NATO summit. This time, the programme included meetings with Erdogan and other officials before a planned journey to Istanbul for talks with Turkish business groups. The alliance provides an existing connection; the visit seeks to give it a broader economic life.
The distance between three and ten
Erdogan put numbers to the ambition. Speaking beside Carney, he said bilateral trade stood at around $3 billion. He hoped to lift it first to $5 billion and eventually to $10 billion. These are targets, not completed transactions. The proposed free-trade agreement still has to be negotiated.
The two leaders’ joint statement committed them to work towards the successful conclusion of that agreement. Erdogan said negotiations would begin before the end of the year; the statement placed the first round in Ankara in November. He insisted that raising relations to a strategic partnership would amount to more than a symbolic change on paper.
“We have today overcome the disconnect that had persisted between Turkiye and Canada for many years. Now, we are launching a new era between Turkiye and Canada,” Erdogan said.
The action plan has four pillars: trade and investment; defence and security; energy; and ties between people. Under trade, investment and innovation, the governments intend to expand business in energy supply, defence production, aerospace and artificial intelligence. The breadth of the list suggests the scale of their ambition. Whether that ambition becomes durable commerce will depend on the work that follows the announcement.
Security enters the agreement
The partnership also reaches into conflicts far from the negotiating table. The leaders declared their intention to deepen bilateral and multilateral defence and security cooperation, and to strengthen cooperation supporting peace and security in the Euro-Atlantic region and beyond. They named Ukraine, the South Caucasus and the Middle East, particularly Gaza. The announcement described a direction for cooperation; it did not, in the measures reported, set out a settlement for any of those conflicts.
Their joint statement placed the agreement against an increasingly complex security environment, rising geopolitical uncertainty and changing humanitarian challenges. A strong and resilient partnership, they said, would help them address shared threats and pursue new opportunities. Energy ministers were assigned a more concrete field of work: liquefied natural gas, nuclear energy and critical minerals.
For Carney, the language was one of interdependence chosen more widely. “Our goal is not self-sufficiency; it is collective resilience, and that’s why Canada is building deeper partnerships with reliable partners that create new opportunities for us both, and in Turkiye, we have an exceptional partner,” he said. He also said relations would expand “for generations to come”.
The immediate test is closer than a generation. November brings the first round of trade talks in Ankara, where the promise of a new relationship must begin taking the form of negotiated terms.