In the wake of United States President Donald Trump’s ongoing threats to make Canada the “51st state,” a recent Leger poll found that 27 per cent of Canadians view their southern neighbour as an “enemy state.”
While a higher share — 30 per cent — view the U.S. as an “ally,” the substantial figure of those willing to use such negative terms to describe the Canadian state’s traditionally closest partner has prompted surprise, as well as disgust from some quarters.
The numbers came shortly after the U.S. anthem received boos and jeers from Canadian spectators at recent sporting events.
But data compiled by Angus Reid Institute (ARI) shows that Canadian views of the U.S. have trended unfavourably since the mid-to-late 1990s.
Highs of 81 per cent favourable were recorded in 1995 under president Bill Clinton — after a ten year period of ratings hovering between the low-to-mid 70s and low 80s — before dipping to 72 per cent in 1999, according to Environics data.
The ratings then fell sharply to 59 per cent favourable under president George W. Bush, before recovering slightly during president Barack Obama’s first term. From then until 2021, the ratings tracked by ARI show a steady decline before dropping off to 41 per cent during Trump’s first term.
The numbers ticked up to a majority, 55 per cent, towards the end of president Joe Biden’s term. But more recent polling indicates a strong Canadian disapproval of Trump’s return to office, with favourable views of the U.S. currently standing at just 39 per cent.
Ninety per cent of Canadians oppose Trump’s “51st state” proposal.
While the most significant drops in favourable views of the U.S. over the past 30 years seem to be associated with unpopular Republican presidents — Bush and Trump — increases in favourable views under their Democratic counterparts — Obama and Biden — never brought overall ratings anywhere close to where they were in 1995 and before that.
What events may have impacted this long-term trend? The Maple took a look back into the news archives for a refresher.
Mass Graves For The Pump?
Marked declines in Canadian views of the U.S. during the 2000s were linked with that country’s wars in the Middle East, dubbed by Bush as America’s “Global War on Terror” following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In the immediate aftermath of those attacks, a strong majority of Canadians reportedly said they held favourable views of the U.S.
At the time, prime minister Jean Chrétien declared: “We will be with the United States every step of the way. As friends. As neighbours. As family.”
Despite those warm words, Bush did not mention Canada in a list of American friends and allies during his first major speech to Congress after the attacks — a speech which included the infamous declaration: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
Nonetheless, thousands of Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill for a “national day of mourning” on September 14, and some even flew American flags from their homes. News articles at the time noted a public outpouring of sympathy and support for the Americans.
On Oct. 7, 2001, the U.S. launched its invasion of Afghanistan as part of the “Global War on Terror” with support from a coalition of forces that included Canadian troops.
The pro-war mood at the time was reflected in a series of Canadian opinion articles that called for death and destruction to be unleashed in revenge for the 9/11 attacks.
For example, Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno wrote on Sept. 12, 2001: “The flexing of U.S. military might is what they crave, the annihilation of those who perpetrated this grotesquerie. And who can blame them for wanting blood?”
Davide Mastracci
Military might and blood is what they got, and in the months and years that followed, Canadians’ opinions of the U.S. dropped steeply.
In 2003, the Americans and a coalition of its allies (which did not include Canada) invaded Iraq, whose government had no connection to the 9/11 attacks.
The invasion, which American leaders justified with fraudulent claims about “weapons of mass destruction,” sparked global outrage and mass protests, including in Canada and the U.S.
The war was widely condemned as an illegal and cynical move to grab Iraq’s oil at a catastrophic civilian cost the country has never fully recovered from. Some Canadian pundits joined their colleagues in the U.S. in supporting the war.
The Chrétien government, however, refused to provide Canadian boots on the ground for the invasion — and was criticized by Bush and Canadian conservatives for doing so. It did, however, provide material and behind-the-scenes support for the war effort.
Canadian vessels provided “force support” in the Arabian Sea, and served as landing pads for American bombing sorties. Canadian pilots also provided surveillance in support of U.S. fighter jets.
Meanwhile, in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, 53 per cent of Canadians said they held unfavourable views about American lawmakers, according to a poll conducted by JMCK. Nonetheless, 70 per cent of those surveyed said they still held positive views about American people in general.
A separate poll conducted by Environics Research Group/Focus Canada in March 2003 showed that Quebecers held particularly negative views of the U.S. Fifty-four per cent held unfavorable views of their southern neighbour, marking a 20 point drop in favourable views among Quebecers from seven months prior.
It was the first time in recent history that a poll indicated a majority of Quebecers held such views, according to the executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, which commissioned the poll.
The dramatic shift in opinion was chalked up to perceptions that the Bush administration was acting like an “aggressive bully” with Iraq.
The U.S. would launch the invasion without support from the United Nations, with vice-president Dick Cheney claiming “my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” By April, with chaos unfolding in Baghdad under the U.S. occupation, secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld simply stated: “Stuff happens.”
Two months later, another poll indicated that Americans took exception to the Canadian government’s refusal to send troops in the initial phase of the invasion.
The percentage of Americans who held positive views of Canada dropped by 18 per cent from the previous year to 65 per cent. Those who viewed Canada unfavourably skyrocketed from four per cent to 24 per cent over the same period.
The same poll showed 63 per cent of Canadians said they held a favourable view of the U.S., down from 72 per cent. A majority of those with negative views blamed Bush, rather than the American people.
From Bad to Worse
As the war dragged on, views would sour even further. In June 2005, a Pew survey found that 59 per cent of Canadians held favourable views of the U.S. — still a majority, but yet another decline.
Canadians also tended to view Americans as “rude,” “greedy” and “violent,” and less than half of those surveyed described their southern neighbours as honest.
Just 19 per cent of Canadians said they felt U.S. foreign policy considered others’ interests, and 57 per cent wanted Canada to take a more “independent approach from the U.S.,” a 14 per cent increase since the beginning of the Iraq War.
Canadians were not alone in these feelings, as the Pew survey report explained: “The United States remains broadly disliked in most countries surveyed, and the opinion of the American people is not as positive as it once was.”
As 2005 drew to a close, an Innovative Research Group poll found 73 per cent of Canadians expressed unfavourable views of Bush, and 38 per cent said the U.S. president posed a greater danger to world security than Osama Bin Laden, who helped orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.
Notwithstanding, a majority still held positive views about Americans in general. One analyst told the National Post the data showed a “visceral dislike of Mr. Bush and the war in Iraq.”
Views on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan also took a hit.
A 2006 poll by Decima Research showed 59 per cent of Canadians said they believed Canadian soldiers were dying in Afghanistan “for a cause we cannot win.”
It would be another 15 years before the U.S. and Canada fully withdrew from Afghanistan in a catastrophic fashion as the Taliban re-took control of the country.
As the Bush era neared its final year, a 2007 Pew poll showed that the U.S. president was less trusted on foreign policy than Russian President Vladimir Putin by respondents in the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada.
Obama To Trump
Obama’s election in November 2008 initially signalled hope for a new era of American relations.
In Canada, favourable views of the U.S. during his first term increased to 68 per cent — a marked improvement from the Bush years, but still below the period in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and well below the Clinton-era highs.
Canadian favourable views of the U.S. would decline slightly by six percentage points to 62 per cent in 2016 — Obama’s final year in office.
Regarding Iraq, the main issue that some analysts said caused such steep global declines in favourable opinions of the U.S. during the Bush administration, Obama pledged to withdraw all American troops by 2011.
But thousands of private military contractors and other personnel remained in Iraq.
The U.S. would later deploy more ground troops and lead a coalition of countries that conducted airstrikes against the insurgent Islamic State group — a campaign which Canada joined with broad initial support from the public (although more mixed responses were recorded by 2016).
Since this article is focused on events that significantly shifted Canadian public opinion on the U.S., we will not delve into a full accounting of Obama’s fraught foreign policy legacy. You can, however, read more about the issue here.
The next major drop-off in favourable views of the U.S. among Canadians occurred during and following the rise of Trump.
The Trump Crash
Even before Trump won his first presidential election in 2016, Canadians held a clear and decisive preference for his rival, Hillary Clinton (who as a senator voted in support of Bush’s war in Iraq).
A majority of Canadians polled in August 2015 said they believed a Trump presidency would be “bad” for Canada. That figure rose to a massive 80 per cent shortly after Trump won the 2016 election.
In 2017, ahead of Canada’s first tariff war with the U.S. under Trump, an ARI poll showed a majority of Canadians did not trust Trump to treat Canada gently during the renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement — which would be replaced by the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement.
In June of that same year, a Pew survey recorded what the Toronto Star described as a “deep national revulsion” of Trump among Canadians that sent favourability ratings of the U.S. to their lowest point in decades — 43 per cent.
Huge majorities expressed opposition to Trump’s signature first-term policies, including building a border wall with Mexico, the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries and withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords.
The Star article also noted “a long tradition of anti-Americanism” in Canada, and quoted historian Jack Granatstein, who called it “the Canadian secular religion.”
Things would get even worse the following year, when Trump slapped steep tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, launching a trade war. An October 2018 Pew poll showed favourability ratings of the U.S. among Canadians had dropped to just 39 per cent.
By 2020, a Pew poll suggested Canadian antipathy toward Trump softened slightly after the tariffs were lifted, with apparent signs of what The Canadian Press described as “an established and growing core of Canadian support for the U.S. leader.”
But in September of that year, amid Trump’s chaotic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the favourability ratings of the U.S. among Canadians dropped even lower, to 35 per cent, according to another Pew poll.
Canadian pollster Frank Graves told the Toronto Star: “Canadians are saying their outlook on the United States is the most unfavourable ever.”
“In the height of the Iraq War, there was enormous antipathy in Canada to George W. Bush, but even then it pales compared to the level of approval of Donald Trump.”
Biden Bounce?
Biden won the 2020 election, and despite rioting by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 in an effort to overturn the presidential election results, Biden took office.
A Pew survey in June 2021 found that Biden’s election “led to a dramatic shift in America’s international image,” with 61 per cent of Canadians viewing the U.S. favourably.
“High levels of confidence in Biden are [...] tied to favorable views of his policies, several of which have emphasized multilateralism and reversed Trump administration decisions,” Pew reported. These included the U.S. rejoining the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord.
The survey also suggested that Biden’s commitments to bolstering support for NATO were well received by international respondents.
However, “Although Biden’s more multilateral approach to foreign policy is welcomed, there is still a widespread perception that the U.S. mainly looks after its own interests in world affairs,” the report noted.
Notably, 69 per cent of Canadians said the U.S. has not been a good model for democracy in recent years, and just 34 per cent said they felt the U.S. takes Canada’s interests into consideration when crafting foreign policy — although that was a 16 per cent increase over 2018.
When Biden visited Canada in March 2023, he had higher favourability ratings among Canadians than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did.
At that time, the U.S. and Canada were both providing extensive diplomatic and military support to Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion, a policy that has remained broadly popular among the Canadian public.
By June 2024, 55 per cent of Canadians viewed the U.S. favourably, polling from ARI showed.
That represented a 20 per cent increase from under Trump, but was still below similar ratings recorded in some of the darkest days of the Bush administration and well below the ratings seen at the end of the Obama presidency.
Meanwhile, the U.S. president was at the time keeping up his steadfast support for Israel as it continued to wage its brutal war on Gaza. That assault has brought allegations of genocide against Israel at the World Court and from leading human rights groups.
Israel’s war on Gaza was unpopular with Canadians. At the same time as ARI published its favourability ratings of Biden, a Leger poll found 45 per cent of Canadians “agree that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip,” and ARI found 55 per cent of Canadians have a negative opinion of Israel.
Opinions of the U.S., Israel’s leading international patron, were significantly lower among younger demographics than their older counterparts, according to ARI’s data.
Conclusion
The polling data over the past three decades do not show a decisive or continuous cause for the downward trend of Canadian favourability ratings of the U.S.
We have no way of knowing, for example, how many people who strongly dislike Trump — and his anti-immigration policies, his mishandling of COVID-19 and his tariffs on Canadian goods — also held unfavourable views of the U.S. because of and/or during its aggression against Iraq.
It’s certainly the case that some Canadian public figures who supported the Iraq War and other American military interventions are not fans of Trump.
Relatedly, some Canadians who saw the U.S. favourably under Biden are more likely to feel the opposite under Trump, and vice versa. Other data suggest these preferences are shaped by which Canadian political parties the respondents support.
What is clear is that overall favourability ratings of the U.S. have taken their steepest nosedives under Republican presidents known for their overtly bellicose actions and words, and have never fully recovered.
The ratings regained some ground under Democratic presidents who took similarly aggressive actions — but in some cases used less overt rhetoric — on the world stage, but never came close to the favourable views recorded at the turn of the last century.
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