Canadians favour other countries over Donald Trump's America, survey suggests

At the same time, Canadians are feeling positive about the other G7 member nations: Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

“We’ve kind of lost our best friend in the United States and maybe, as a country, Canada is now looking toward some of its older friends to reconnect with as a result of that,” said Dan Arnold, Pollara’s chief strategy officer, referring to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods that have led to a trade war between the neighbouring countries.

Indeed, the firm polled people in Canada and the U.K. and found similar results on both sides of the Atlantic.

Five out of six Canadians — 83 per cent — said the bilateral relationship with Britain was “important” with only 17 per cent saying it wasn’t.

Across the pond, 76 per cent of Britons said their country’s relationship with Canada was “important” while about one in four said it was not.

The British have a more positive view of Canada (+78 per cent) than any other country in the poll — ahead of Japan (+61 per cent), Germany (+60 per cent), France (+50 per cent) and Ukraine (+47 per cent).

But the poll found they have a negative view toward India (-1 per cent), the U.S. (-3 per cent), China (-24 per cent) and Russia (-63 per cent).

Among Canadians, Italy has a +66 per cent favourability rating followed by Japan at +64 per cent, the U.K. at +59 per cent, France at +57 per cent, Germany at +54 per cent and Ukraine at +41 per cent.

China was at -27 per cent, India at -29 per cent, the U.S. at -47 per cent and Russia at -63 per cent.

That’s a 60 percentage point drop in Canadian sentiment toward the American since Pollara’s survey last year when Joe Biden was U.S. president.

Using online panels, Pollara surveyed 3,400 Canadians on May 16-20. While opt-in polls cannot be assigned a margin of error, for comparison purposes, a random sample of this size would have one of plus or minus 1.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Similarly, the firm polled 2,511 Britons on May 2-16. The margin of error for comparable surveys is within 1.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

“If the Americans aren’t going to be the number-one ally in many respects for the next three years (of Trump’s presidency) … then the Canada-U.K. relationship is something that bears some noting,” said Arnold, pointing out Canada’s recently elected Prime Minister Mark Carney used to be governor of the Bank of England.

Because of that, 60 per cent of Britons are familiar with him, and of those, 80 per cent had a positive view of Carney, who succeeded Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader on March 9 and was elected April 28. Just seven per cent had a negative view and the rest had no opinion.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not as well known among Canadians. Only 26 per cent were familiar with him. Of those, 58 per cent had a positive view with 30 per cent negative and the remainder had no opinion. That’s an overall +28 per cent for Starmer, who won power last summer.

The most admired foreign leader among Canadians was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who will attend the G7 summit that begins Sunday. 

Zelenskyy, whose country was invaded by Russia in 2022, was at +53 per cent, ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron (+46 per cent), German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (+33 per cent), Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba (+31 per cent) and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (+29 per cent).

On the negative side of the ledger, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will also be at the G7, was at -17 per cent, ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping (-52 per cent), Trump (-66 per cent) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (-69 per cent).

Neither Xi nor Putin was invited to Kananaskis.