It appears the election of U.S. President Donald Trump has done more harm than good to the country’s reputation.
A poll conducted by Pew Research Centre of 37 countries has found that opinions about the United States have deteriorated nearly everywhere. The research centre’s findings state that the “world’s views of the U.S. and its president have shifted dramatically downward from where they were at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency.”
READ MORE: Image of the United States has plunged under Donald Trump, survey shows
And that downward trend is evident in Canada as well.
In 2017, 43 per cent of Canadians surveyed said they had a favourable view of the U.S., while 51 per cent said they did not. That’s a decline of 22 percentage points from last year when 65 per cent of Canadians held favourable opinions about the country.
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Only 22 per cent of Canadians had confidence in Trump as president — a stark change from the 83 per cent who said they had confidence in Obama last year.
The survey added that most respondents viewed Trump as “arrogant, intolerant and even dangerous.”
It also pointed out that Canada is more likely to have favourable views of its southern neighbour, but this is the lowest opinion Canadians have held since the survey began in 2002.
During the George W. Bush era, Canadian confidence in the president dropped to 28 per cent at its lowest. Obama enjoyed high favourability throughout his terms; Canadian confidence in the leader was 76 per cent at its lowest.
In an October 2015 report, Pew stated that Canadians often disagree with the U.S. over key issues such as pipelines and trade deals, but that hadn’t led to much lower favourability.
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However, approval did drop nine percentage points between 2002 and 2003 to 63 per cent, after the start of the Iraq war.
Nearly every other country in this year’s survey had similar views of the U.S. Only 13 per cent of respondents in France said they had confidence in Trump, 11 per cent of Germans, and 22 per cent of people in Britain.
Russia (53 per cent) and Israel (56 per cent) were the only two countries to have gained confidence in the country’s leadership since Trump’s election.
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The survey’s results are comparable to other recent findings, such as an Ipsos poll that stated 40 per cent of respondents across 25 countries thought U.S. had a positive influence in world affairs — a decline of 24 percentage points over the past year.
“For the U.S. it has just crashed,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, told Global News at the time.
— With a file from Global News reporter Rebecca Joseph
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