Canadian public opinion on our relationships with other countries 2025

In 2025, Canadians find themselves facing a much less certain international situation than they have been used to. Some of this is due to the persistence of conflicts in Ukraine, and in Israel and Gaza, and the wider threats they pose to international peace and security. Some of this is due to the cooling of relations with influential countries such as China and India.

And much of it is the result of the return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the White House, with his protectionist policies and annexationist rhetoric. Canadians are used to being overlooked by U.S. administrations. In recent months, they have discovered that this is preferable to being the target of a president who has described Canada as “mean and nasty.”

These events have sharply impacted how Canadians see their relations with several other countries. In particular, the United States, Russia, China, India and Israel are all much less likely to be perceived as friends of Canada today than they were several years ago. The change is especially striking in the case of the United States. The proportion of Canadians who think of the U.S. as a friend is less than half of what it was a little more than a decade ago, prior to Donald Trump’s first term in office.

The Focus Canada survey is based on telephone interviews conducted (via landline and cellphones) with a representative sample of 2,004 Canadians (ages 18 and over), between September 8 and 21, 2025. A sample of this size drawn from the population produces results accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points in 19 out of 20 samples.