Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Common European Home was a geopolitical concept created and championed by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It envisioned a Europe of sovereign, economically interdependent nations free from military confrontation, where a doctrine of restraint would replace the doctrine of deterrence. Gorbachev proposed it as an alternative to a continent divided into opposing military blocs.
Gorbachev used the phrase "our common house" in a 1985 statement, but the concept received its most famous articulation in April 1987 during a visit to Czechoslovakia, when he delivered his main address in Prague. A related phrase had been used earlier by Leonid Brezhnev during a visit to Bonn in 1981.
On the 6th of July 1989, speaking before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Gorbachev declared that the philosophy of the Common European Home ruled out the probability of an armed clash and the very possibility of force or threat of force anywhere on the continent. He argued this was not a play on words but the logic of European development prompted by life itself.
Journalist Jim Hoagland wrote that Gorbachev's Common European Home and President George H. W. Bush's competing phrase "Europe Whole and Free" were two concepts describing the same underlying situation. That situation was the economic and ideological collapse of Soviet power alongside the European Community's growing dynamism and economic clout.
Analysts at the time interpreted the rhetoric as a strategy to prevent an outright revolt of Eastern European countries from the Eastern Bloc. Analyst Ronald D. Asmus later noted that Gorbachev's vision was premised on the belief that reform in Eastern Europe could be controlled and that reformist communist parties would continue to play important roles, including in the German Democratic Republic.
Yes. The joint declaration signed by Gorbachev and Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Bonn on the 13th of June 1989 explicitly stated that Canada and the United States would have a role in the Common European Home. This followed private talks Gorbachev held with Kohl and President Richard von Weizsacker the previous day.