OTTAWA — A new poll suggests that more than a quarter of Canadians — 27% — now see the United States as an “enemy” country, while another 30% still say they consider the U.S. an ally.
Another 27% of respondents to the Leger survey said they consider the United States to be a “neutral” country.
The poll comes as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to impose economically devastating tariffs on Canada and has repeatedly pushed the idea that Canada should become a U.S. state.
The poll was conducted between Feb. 14 and Feb. 17 and surveyed 1,500 Canadians and 1,000 Americans. Because it was conducted online, it can’t be assigned a margin of error.
Sebastien Dallaire, Leger’s executive vice-president for Eastern Canada, said he was surprised “to see Canadians so divided on that front when the United States has been an ally for such a long period, and a strong ally at that.”
He said “enemy” is a “strong word.”
“The responses basically speak to the level of animosity that we feel right now in Canada and that are triggering kind of a broader rally-around-the-flag effect in all aspects of our lives,” Dallaire said.
Only 1% of Americans told Leger they consider Canada an enemy country, while 56% said they view Canada as an ally.
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An overwhelming majority of Canadians dislike Trump; 74% of respondents said they have an unfavourable view of the U.S. president. Dallaire said it’s “hard to get more consensual results when you ask a question like this.”
Seven per cent said they didn’t know enough about Trump to offer an opinion, while only 13% overall said they had a favourable opinion of him.
That number is higher among Conservative party supporters; 27% of them said they have a favourable view of Trump, compared to only five and seven per cent of Liberal and NDP supporters, respectively.
Conservatives were also more likely to have a positive view of the United States — 48% of Conservative supporters surveyed described it as an ally, while only 18% called it an enemy state.
Just 20% of Liberals and 21% of NDP supporters said the U.S. was an ally, while 37% of Liberal supporters and 34% of New Democrats said it was an enemy. Nearly half of Bloc Quebecois voters — 47% — said the United States is an enemy country.
“There is a partisan difference in terms of how people feel about this,” Dallaire said. “It’s clearly a pretty big gap between Conservative supporters and Liberal, NDP and Bloc supporters.”
The polling industry’s professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.