With Brexit leaving CETA on shaky ground, Trudeau can only sit and wait

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What does Canada do now that Brexit is real? Fret.

The Bank of Canada and the Finance Department will be on alert because of the turmoil in financial markets.

Brexit: The latest developments, how it happened and what's next

But for the most part, there's little that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government can do immediately but watch to see how Britain will unwind its intricate ties to the European Union, and wonder how it will affect Canada – in particular the trade deal Ottawa has already negotiated, but not yet signed, with a soon-to-be-split European Union.

Britain is a major ally, Canada's third-largest trading partner, one of its closest, most like-minded friends, and its chief contact in that globally important, stable bloc that is the EU. Except that Britain won't be in the EU much longer, and the EU doesn't seem so stable anymore. It's hard for the Canadian government to tell what kind of Britain, or what kind of EU, it will be dealing with in two years.

There's no immediate rupture to practical, day-to-day ties. That's not only because Britain remains in the EU for up to two years, but because key matters such as security arrangements – co-operation with Britain within the U.S.-led Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, and military co-operation under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – don't involve the EU. Outside of trade, most of Canada's diplomatic agreements with Britain are country-to-country arrangements.

But the Brexit vote has the potential to derail a key element of the Canadian government's trade agenda, the trade deal with the EU that was expected to be signed in October. Mr. Trudeau and his ministers will almost certainly be making calls to European officials in coming days, but no one can really give guarantees right now.

It was a deal negotiated under former prime minister Stephen Harper, but Mr. Trudeau's Liberal government still sees it as a major part of their trade-expansion efforts. His trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, scrambled to save the EU trade deal by reworking the controversial investor-state provisions that had riled critics in Europe.

Now that trade deal is not only jeopardized by the instability within the EU, it is suddenly a lesser prize for Canadian business.

One-third of Canada's trade with the EU is with Britain, so the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement is now about two-thirds as valuable as it was last week. Its provisions to guarantee access for financial services were valuable to Canadian banks set up in the City of London to do business across Europe, but now, it seems, that value has shrunk. The measures to provide mobility rights for employees of Canadian firms are a little less valuable, too.

In fact, the whole complex calculation of the CETA deal – concessions in one sector for gains in another – has been unbalanced. Mr. Trudeau has suggested that even after Brexit he would still be intent on trying to press ahead with the EU deal, though Britain's departure would mean the loss of a pro-deal voice inside the EU.

The bigger threat to that trade agreement is probably EU turmoil. Britain's departure could fuel the anti-EU forces in other countries, so the bloc, already coping with one exit, could be further consumed with its own stability. After Brexit, European politicians might grow fearful of their own globalization-wary constituents, and the activists who don't want the EU to sign new trade deals – a sentiment aimed mainly at a potential agreement with the U.S., but which sometimes blows over into the CETA. The major task of the Trudeau government now is to lobby European leaders to keep a distracted EU on track to sign the deal in October.

Then there's Britain. What happens to Canada's third-largest trading partnership? The British now have the task of renegotiating all their trade arrangements, with the EU and everyone else. In theory, the British could simply unilaterally apply the CETA as is, but that's unlikely. Even the existing EU tariffs Canadian firms pay to export products to Britain could be changed, so there's a reason for Canada and Britain to strike a deal of their own. But for the moment, Mr. Trudeau cannot even know who he would speak to about that, since his British counterpart, David Cameron, is to resign in October.

All that is only part of what Mr. Trudeau has to fret about now, as a Canadian leader on a shifting world stage. Will Brexit spark global economic slowdown? Scottish separation from Britain? Since its birth, Canada has looked to Britain as a touchstone ally in international affairs and, more recently, as a key player in an EU bloc whose weight mattered not only on trade, but on climate-change talks and dealing with the global flow of refugees. Mr. Trudeau will know he has to grapple with change, but at the moment, he can't know precisely what form it will take.