Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where America is the enemy, and every time Trump lowers the trade temperature, Canada cranks it back up. Let’s jump right in!
Canadians have been angry with American presidents before, but we always distinguished the country from the man running it.
During the Iraq War in 2003, 83 percent of Canadians said they liked Americans, according to one survey, even though 57 percent disliked the George W. Bush administration. In 2023, only 1 percent of Canadians said Canada should treat the United States as an enemy, while 73 percent said it should be seen as a valued ally or at least as a friend.
Barely 20 percent of Canadians now call the U.S. an ally, a survey by Leger found, and 41 percent see America as an “enemy country.” The second percentage has jumped 15 points since June 2025, and among Canadians at least 55 years old, 51 percent regard the country with which we share the world’s longest undefended border as an enemy.
I wrote about this unprecedented deterioration in Canadian attitudes back in February, when I wondered if the changes were anti-Americanism or anti-Trumpism. A Politico poll then found that nearly half of Canadians considered the U.S. a bigger threat to world peace than Russia. More than half of those surveyed said that America was no longer a reliable ally and that they would rather rely on China than on President Donald Trump’s America.
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