Canada's becoming a member of the European Union (EU) is unlikely, but not impossible, experts say, Politico reports.

In a recent poll, a whopping 44 percent of Canadians said they supported the idea of EU membership, compared with only 34 percent who dismissed the idea.

European Commission chief spokesperson Paula Pinho noted that Brussels was “honored with the results of such a poll,” but appeared to confirm that only European countries are eligible for membership, according to the bloc’s governing treaties.

“Canada would certainly qualify,” said Frank Schimmelfennig, professor of European politics at ETH Zurich, as it is “in very many ways probably closer to those European values, institutions and policies than many of the current candidate countries.”

“Being European is more of a state of mind,” Giselle Bosse, professor of EU external democracy support at Maastricht University, told Poitico.

“Legally and formally a European state is not actually defined and looking into the past, we’ve had European states that in a way are not limited to the European continent,” said Bosse, pointing out that EU countries have overseas territories in the Caribbean, Pacific, and the Arctic.

She called Canadians “special Europeans, in a way” for reasons including their belief in the welfare state, their political and legal systems being based on European models, and many Canadians having continental ancestry.

But Ian Bond, deputy director at the Center for European Reform, believes “it would be extremely difficult to make the case that Canada is a European country” for several reasons.

Even if it were to pass the test of so-called Europeanness, “practical economics” would get in the way, he said.

“Canada would then have to put the customs border between itself and the U.S. and apply EU tariffs and regulations on imports from the U.S. … It would be incredibly economically destructive. It would outweigh any benefits that it might expect to get from the [EU] membership over many, many years,” Bond added.