Canadians view China more favourably than the United States, according to a Pew Research Center survey released on July 15. The margin is not narrow: 44% of Canadians hold a favourable view of China against 33% for the US, BNN Bloomberg reported. Three years ago those numbers were almost exactly reversed.
In 2023, 57% of Canadians viewed the US favourably and 14% said the same of China. The American figure has fallen 24 points since. By 2025 Canadians rated the two countries about equally, and this year the crossover completed itself.
The four countries that complicate the story
Pew surveyed 42,151 people across 36 countries between February 8 and May 13, and found the US now trails China in most of them. It still leads in six: India, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Poland and Israel.
Look at that list again. Four of the six sit in China’s immediate neighbourhood. The countries with the most direct exposure to Chinese power are the ones that still prefer Washington, while a treaty ally sharing the world’s longest undefended border with the United States has flipped. This is not a clean story about American decline. Proximity to China, more than alliance with America, is what predicts a pro-US answer.
That Canadians view China warmly from 10,000 kilometres away, while Manila and Seoul do not from across a contested sea, says less about China than about what distance permits. Canada is not weighing Chinese coast guard vessels or airspace incursions. It is weighing a trading partner it rarely has to think about against a neighbour it cannot avoid.
Why Canadians view China as the steadier partner
Laura Silver, associate director of Pew’s Global Attitudes Research, put the comparison in terms of reliability rather than affection.
“By comparison, we know that China is seen to be a more reliable partner in many places. It’s more likely to be seen to contribute to global peace and stability.”
That is a specific claim, and a narrow one. It is not that people have warmed to China’s political system. It is that China is read as predictable. Predictability is a low bar, and it is the bar the US is now measured against.
What Canadians did not say
One finding cuts against the easy interpretation. Canadians still rate the United States above China on respecting personal freedoms — that comparison has not flipped. But the American margin there has narrowed by 25 points since 2021.
So the shift is not Canadians deciding China is freer. It is Canadians deciding the US is less dependable, while continuing to distinguish between a country’s politics and its reliability as a partner. Those are separable judgements, and Canadians are making them separately.
The border context Pew did not measure
The survey ran from February to May, a stretch in which Canada’s relationship with Washington was under open strain. Prime Minister Mark Carney described US ties as a “weakness”, and Ottawa has pushed back on trade terms, insisting it will not let the US dictate the shape of USMCA.
Public opinion tends to follow that kind of friction rather than lead it. A 24-point fall over three years is not a mood swing; it tracks a period in which the relationship itself changed.
How much weight the numbers carry
Pew reports margins of error between 2.3 and 5.5 percentage points depending on the country, and the survey used a mix of telephone, face-to-face and online interviews, with the method varying by country. An 11-point gap between 44% and 33% sits comfortably outside that range.
The full Pew report covers all 36 countries. Canada is not the outlier in it — it is one case in a broad pattern, which is arguably the more uncomfortable finding. Countries that flip on the US are not doing it one at a time for local reasons.
The survey also cannot say what Canadians would do about it. Favourability is not policy, and no poll asked whether Canadians want their government to move closer to Beijing — a question on which the answer would very likely differ from these numbers.
What it does say is that the reservoir of goodwill a country draws on in a dispute has drained. Canadians view China at 44% and their closest ally at 33%, and that gap is the room a government has to manoeuvre in. Favourability moved 24 points in three years once. It can move back.
