A European Union official threatened to impose travel restrictions on Canadians if Ottawa did not keep its promise to relax visa requirements on new EU member states.
"There will be for sure a discussion about introducing visas for Canadian citizens,'' if no progress is made, the EU's justice and home affairs commissioner Franco Frattini told reporters in Brussels on Tuesday.
Frattini presented a report to the justice and interior ministers of the 27 member countries of the European Union. The report urged Canada to "show some tangible process" on relaxing visa access requirements to eight member states that joined the EU in 2004.
The commissioner urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to make good on promises he made at summit talks in June to ensure more visa-free travel for Europeans going to Canada, according to The Associated Press.
Frattini believed that it was "not enough" for Canada to ease visa requirements for only one new member state.
"I would keep urging Canadian authorities to keep to what they have promised,'' he said.
The eight members of the EU that still do not have visa-free access to travel in Canada are as follows:
- Bulgaria
- Czech Republic
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Hungary
- Poland
- Romania
- Slovakia
"When those new member states joined the EU we obliged those member states to lift any requirements they had against Canadian travellers," Dorian Prince, EU ambassador to Canada told CTV's Canada AM Tuesday. "So we're looking to rebalance the situation and our goal is to have completely free visa travel in both directions between Canada and the EU."
Late Monday, a spokesman for Canada's Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley said that Ottawa was committed to lifting restrictions in an expedient manner.
The commission said Canadian officials would visit four of the eight countries in November and four in February for technical talks.
Earlier, Prince said retaliatory measures on the visa access issue were unlikely.
"I would say that at the moment we think things are going well and the likelihood of any measures by the EU is frankly very remote," Prince said.
While some visa-free access has been granted to Cyprus, Malta, Estonia and Slovenia, EU members Hungary and the Czech Republic feel their citizens are being given limited access in Canada because of unjustified immigration fears.
With files from The Associated Press
