Look at the damage....

Look how much Canadians hate the United States now

It’s not just about the trade war. Nearly half of America’s neighbors to the north now think the U.S. is a bigger threat to world peace than Russia.

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey and Anna Wiederkehr

It’s the world’s most awkward breakup.

More than a year after U.S. President Donald Trump casually joked about absorbing Canada and repeatedly threatened debilitating tariffs on its goods, many Canadians are convinced their former pals to the south have lost the plot.

New results from The POLITICO Poll suggest a lasting chill has settled over the world’s former bosom buddies. Americans are rosy as ever about their northern neighbors, but Canadians don’t share the love.

Their message to America: It’s not us, it’s you.

Canadians don’t see Trump’s America as merely an annoyance, the survey found. They consider the superpower next door the world’s greatest threat to peacetime.

The POLITICO Poll — in partnership with U.K. polling firm Public First — finds Canadians increasingly view the United States as a source of global volatility instead of as a stabilizing ally.

This article is part of an ongoing project from POLITICO and Public First, an independent polling company headquartered in London, to measure public opinion across a broad range of policy areas.

In survey question after survey question, Canadians say the U.S. no longer reflects their values, is more likely to provoke conflict than to prevent it and, as a result, is pushing Canada to consider closer ties with other global powers — including overtures to China that would have seemed unthinkable only a couple of years ago.

Here’s the Canada-U.S. schism explained.

AN UNRELIABLE ALLY

Canadians are wary of their ability to depend on the US

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rose to power on a pledge to defend Canada from Trump. When the realities of a prolonged trade war set in, he promised to reduce Canada’s reliance on its nearest neighbor.

Roughly three-quarters of Canadian exports find their way to U.S. customers. Carney has traveled the world in search of new partnerships with the European Union, China and Qatar. A new defense industrial strategy sets targets aimed at building up domestic production and buying overseas kit for the military only when necessary.

Carney put a finer point on his worldview with a headline-making rallying cry in Davos: In a world of great-power rivalry and fewer rules, middle powers need to band together.

The POLITICO Poll shows Carney’s approach is popular at home.

Canadians were the most likely — among respondents in Canada, Germany, France and the U.K. — to say the U.S. is not a reliable ally (58 percent).

A slight 42 percent plurality of respondents from Canada go even further, saying the U.S. is no longer an ally of Canada. Only about one in three Canadians, 37 percent, said “The US is still an ally of Canada.”

Other results that reveal the extent of Canada’s mistrust:

57 percent of Canadians in the poll said the U.S. cannot be depended on in a crisis.

67 percent say the U.S. “challenges” — as opposed to supports — its allies around the world.

69 percent agree the U.S. tends to create problems for other countries rather than solve them.

The threat next door

Canadians consider the US a bigger threat than Russia

Europeans see the greatest threat to world peace in their own backyard.

Slight majorities in the three European countries in the poll chose Russia, which upended the global order nearly four years ago with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as the largest threat: Germany (56 percent), France (55 percent) and the UK (53 percent).

Canadians are likewise worried about what’s next door.

Almost half of Canadians point a finger at the U.S. — a 19-point lead over Russia, which took the next largest share (29 percent). A large plurality of Canadians (43 percent) see the U.S. as “mostly a threat” to global stability. Another 34 percent say Americans are “sometimes a force for stability, sometimes a threat.”

Conservative voters agree that the U.S. is the top threat to peace — but only 35 percent of them. Another 30 percent picked Russia, followed by 22 percent who said China.

A fire starter

Canadians across parties agree: Trump is the antagonist

More than two out of three Canadians believe Trump is actively seeking conflict with other countries.

Liberal voters who powered Carney’s stunning victory last year — a rare fourth-consecutive win for the party — overwhelmingly see things that way. Progressive New Democrats are even likelier than the centrist governing party to hold that view.

But even Conservative voters, who broadly support close and enduring ties with Americans, have mixed feelings. A 57 percent majority say the U.S. president is looking around the world for a fight.

And that foreign intervention worries them, too: 47 percent of Canadians say U.S. involvement overseas makes the world less safe.

A look east

Canadians warm to a closer relationship with China

In the middle of the Covid pandemic, Canadians viewed Beijing with deep suspicion.

Chinese authorities had for more years imprisoned two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, on espionage charges.

Ottawa and Western allies widely viewed the so-called Two Michaels’ prolonged detention as retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei exec Meng Wanzhou as part of an extradition request from Washington.

In 2021, several months before the Two Michaels were released, a Research Co. survey revealed a low point in Canadians’ take on China: only 19 percent held a positive view.

The U.S. president’s torching of the relationship with Canada has flipped public opinion.

Forced to pick, a majority of Canadians (57 percent) now say they’d rather depend on China than Trump’s America.

Asked whether Canada should deliberately move closer to China, 39 percent agreed — with a majority of those respondents (60 percent) directly naming Trump as the reason to build bridges across the Pacific.

An eye toward the future

Canadians are optimistic about US–Canada ties in a post-Trump era

Any prolonged Canada-U.S. tension feels deeply personal to many border-town residents. The rivers and lakes and straight-line boundaries that divide the two countries were for decades just technicalities.

Ask a Canadian who grew up on the Ontario side of Niagara Falls, and they’ll talk about going “over the river” — not across a border — to visit friends and family, go to work or have a night out.

But Canadian visits to the U.S. have dropped significantly since Trump’s inauguration. Tourists are taking their money elsewhere. Snowbirds who flock annually to Florida and Arizona have found other sunny options.

A declining state of affairs has frayed countless deeply woven ties.

Still, respondents expressed some optimism about the future.

Forty-one percent of Canadians say Trump represents a lasting change. But nearly half (49 percent) said the relationship between the United States and Canada will recover in a post-Trump era.

A similar proportion of Canadians share that optimism across party lines: Liberal (51 percent), Conservative (50) and NDP (46).

But then there’s the solid core of skeptics — 29 percent of the country is convinced there is no going back.

Carney won on an “elbows up” rallying cry that urged Canadians to stand up for themselves. Now they’re reckoning with the everyday impact of a lasting cross-border rupture.

The country seems to have settled on a new maxim for now: America if necessary, but not necessarily America.