Canada-EU: a "breakthrough of its kind", and the war is good business for shipowners

According to RFI, Canada and the European Union sealed on Friday 30 October in Montreal the closest alliance ever concluded between a non-European country and the Twenty-Seven. RFI speaks of a "breakthrough of its kind" ("rapprochement inédit"), driven by the Canadian Prime Minister's desire to shake off dependence on the United States. The announced partnerships cover artificial intelligence, critical minerals and Ukraine.

Let us be clear: the RFI dispatch says nothing about the Middle East, nor about oil freight, nor about shipowners. We therefore do not know whether the agreement contains an energy or maritime component, and we will not invent figures on charter rates. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Take the general mechanism, which current events make familiar. When a conflict breaks out in an oil-producing region, the crude does not vanish; it is the available ships that become scarce. Routes lengthen, insurance becomes dearer, zones are avoided: every tanker immobilised or diverted removes capacity from a market where the supply of vessels cannot adjust over a weekend. A shipyard takes years to deliver. Freight rates therefore climb, and the difference does not fall from the sky: it is levied on the final price of energy, and so on manufacturers, states and, at the end of the chain, households.

This is where the language of the market becomes convenient. We read that "rates are soaring", that "the market is anxious". That is the fetishism of the commodity: relations between people presented as movements of things. Behind "freight is booming" stand companies setting tariffs, funds that own fleets, insurers repricing risk. The war becomes, for them, a scarcity rent: income that rewards no innovation, only the possession of a capacity that has become impossible to find.

And labour in all this? The seafarers who sail in risk zones produce the value being transported; their wages, however, do not follow the curve of charter rates. This is the classic wage relation: the gap between what labour brings in and what it is paid widens when the economy smiles on capital. We have no data on this precise point, but the structure is well known.

There remains the link, tenuous but real, with Montreal. An alliance aiming at autonomy in critical minerals and energy presents itself as a matter of sovereignty. Yet sovereignty travels on cargo ships and tankers owned by private actors. Securing supplies also means deciding who will capture the logistics rent the next time a conflict makes ships scarce. The dispatch says nothing of this; it is precisely the question to put to the signatories.