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(Since Trump vs Trudeau/Carney is pure culture war, this counts) Every now and again there are throwaway lines in comments here about how Canada is a bad ally, or incompetent, or just generally bad-and-should-feel-bad. And believe me, lots of us do. But those Canadians who disapprove of the direction the country has taken usually do so for internal political reasons (Justin Trudeau, immigration, house prices, indigenous rights-gone-wild, virtue-signalling gun laws, etc). The comments I'm talking about are usually hinting at foreign affairs, but even the most self-hating Canadian usually believes Canada is internationally respected. Please offer below your critiques/complaints about Canada from a foreign affairs/relations standpoint.
Canada is certainly less internationally respected than it used to be, but I see it that way because most people don't remember that for a time Canada genuinely used to punch well above its weight diplomatically as a mediator between the Great Powers - Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for a reason. It's not that Canada has blown up its reputation, more that Canada has regressed to the mean in terms of its international role.
I'll give my impression of the groups I'm familiar with:
The Anglosphere: Canada is probably the least culturally-impactful Anglosphere country. Australia has its reputation for partying and wildlife, South Africa is a prominent tourist destination with whiffs of political controversy, New Zealand has Lord of the Rings (and otherwise breathtaking nature), and a surprising number of Kiwis in other Anglosphere countries. Canada has, well, it has politics. Even the only Canadian novelist most people can name (Atwood) is known entirely for her politics and not, say, her poetry.
Europe: I've literally never heard a European bring up Canada except to do with their political opposition to America. So, respected, but not in any sort of sense particular to Canada. Still, "honourary Euro" isn't a bad rank to be on in European minds. I guess this is kind of similar to the Anglosphere, Canada is seen basically as a political actor in the Big Drama of hyperpower internal politics.
Immigrants or aspiring immigrants: Caveat that I have no experience with Indians in this respect. Canada is seen as USA B - the money isn't as good, and the climate certainly isn't, but it's easier to get in. The politics don't really matter except for the extremely online/TV-boomer. There are a few countries where the diaspora in Canada is higher-class back home than the diaspora in the States, presumably for weird historical reasons, and they note that where that's the case.
Countries receiving Canadian aid: lol lmao the people on the ground don't give a shit where the water pump or the antiretrovirals come from, if they even know. I don't have enough personal experience with e.g. the Rwandan government to know how they see Canada, but African leaders are generally pretty hard-nosed guys who see aid providers as fungible. Aid buys you some photo-ops for your ambassador and nice comments for the papers back home and that's it.
I skimmed a few articles about asking USAID recipients where they think the aid is from. A vast supermajority have no idea.
I have seen far more affection for the US in Iraq and Afghanistan than I have in African towns which are currently getting their drinking water, HIV meds, etc. etc. from the largesse of the US - not to say they don't like Americans, but to them Americans are just cool guys on TV and sometimes tourists. Aid is just something that happens down there, Gods Must Be Crazy style.
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As someone in the US, I worry for you guys. You seem like a whole country of Californias but cursed with bad weather. I used to think you guys were friendly enough, but in recent years I've had several Canadians tell me in no uncertain terms that they disdain me and other Americans. I had the best maple syrup candy in Canada when I was a kid and so that's nice. If you guys want to be friends lets be friends.
I don't think you guys conceive yourselves as world powers so hopefully I'm not bursting any bubbles when I say you're not. What does being "internationally respected" mean to you? What would it mean if you weren't internationally respected? I think to be internationally respected would mean that there has to be a group outside Canada that is unified or has collective opinions, and that's not how the world works. I think Western Europe likes you more than they like the USA. I doubt most of the rest of the world thinks about you that much. Even the immigrants who are coming to Canada largely try to use it as a stepping stone to the US.
Perhaps the repeated jokes from the POTUS about Canada being the 51st state and the tariffs had something to do with that. This isn't exactly an unprovoked response, so I'm a bit confused as to why you're surprised?
Canadians take pride in things like peacekeeping missions (see Rwanda), international aid/charity and supporting the UN/international order. Have a good reputation abroad may be a better way to put it than being respected. America might be respected abroad, but after the last 25 years of warmongering, there's a lot of people who dislike them.
I've heard Canadians say they despise Americans before this current presidency. And also, I'd understand if they hated Trump or Republicans but it's not just that. I don't see a problem hating the IRGC, but I would be a monster if I despised Iranians as a category.
Yeah, as far as reputation goes, there's a reason some American tourists have taken to calling themselves Canadian when overseas since the 90s.
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In my experience, Canadians felt like that before Trump ran. It's less often expressed when a Democrat is president, but my impression is that Canadians feel like that all the time about Americans.
With all due respect, that is exactly the kind of attitude that disgusts me from other Canadians.
Canadians will never be blamed if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and starts blasting everyone. If Saddam actually had WMDs and detonated them, I dunno, in Europe. Or if China seizes Taiwan and stops exporting chips to the rest of the world. We can sit pretty and always condemn "war" or "agression" or those silly Americans that put so much of their budget on their military instead of universal healthcare or whatever else we feel better than them about that day, safe in the knowledge that no one actually expects us to bear any responsability for the state of the world. The day Canadians will actually matter, then their complains about "warmongering" on the part of Americans will actually be deserving of more than a spit in the face.
I can't speak for every Canadian, but I feel confident I've met probably an order of magnitude or two more than you. Most of the people I know would vacation in America (snowbirds, cape cod, skiing) and have been for decades. They've nearly all boycotted America since ~mid-2025. Seems to be borne out by the data.
I don't think they have any delusions about meaningfully hurting the US, but they're pissed and don't want to spend their money here.
Nor will Americans. Arguably, the withdrawal from the JCPOA (supported by Europe) led to another war.
Yeah, except he didn't, and America lied about it to justify a war.
I agree with this to some extent, but that isn't carte blanche for America to (as the realpolitikers are fond of saying) do as it wills while the rest of the world suffers as it must. And it isn't an actual rebuttal of their claims. Would an America with the same resources and economy coupled with the foreign policy of Canada be better or worse for the world on net?
My friend. I am Canadian.
I mixed you up with Oracle, but so am I. I left as an adult.
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For me at least, and I think a non-trivial amount of people, recent years have actually laid bare what that actually means. It doesn't mean Canada or Canadians do or did things that are particularly worthy of respect, it means that Canadians reliably vote for politicians that mouth things that the kind of people who end up reporting on international affairs in newsrooms all over the western world like to hear. Nothing more. Because the vast majority of people don't really have any kind of informed opinion on anything Canada does, they just respond to the applause light on their TV set.
*EDIT: But as for my opinion of Canada in the realm of foreign affairs, as a nominal Canadian (Quebec separatist), my opinion is that Canada is much like European Union nations, benefitting greatly from the current world order and our relative irrelevance allows us the decadent luxury of never really having to take consequential hard decisions for the world. The attitude sickens and disgusts me, not that I believe my people, the Québecois, would be much better about it, and I believe we are much deserving the "fuck you, respect us you freeloader" from the Americans we're currently getting, for the smug attitude if nothing else.
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From a Malaysian, currently living in Australia: I usually don't really think about Canada all too much since pretty little of what it does affects me. I have been over there, and kind of have to agree with @OliveTapenade in that I think of it as being like a less belligerent and less polarised US with more legacy allegiance to Britain, with the (sort of hilarious) quirk that the nation's self-conception is largely defined around not being the US despite sharing a very large number of cultural characteristics with their more powerful neighbour. Perhaps the differences may seem large if all you know is the North American cultural sphere, but to the rest of the world the distinction is not that clear. Canada is really just not all that distinctive internationally nor is it that prominent when it comes to foreign affairs.
When it comes to being "internationally respected", I could not honestly say I respect Canada that much. This may be harsh but when it comes to my respect and regard for a nation, it's not geopolitical leaning that most influences my view, but general competence, and that includes how it handles internal concerns. Its ability to build infrastructure, deliver on QoL things like safety and convenience, and just generally make canny and efficient decisions are all important. But the sheer tragedy that is Toronto's public transport is illustrative of a larger problem Canada has. When they insist on building Transit City-like Potemkin light rail transport all over the city, then spend 10+ years and billions of dollars to build a single line that's barely faster than the bus lane it replaced, THEN promise to try and fix the failure with bullshit like signal priority as if that isn’t just duct-taping over a serious structural issue, well, "respect" is not what comes to mind. When I think about Vancouver's little experiment in decriminalisation which quickly made them the fentanyl capital of North America (the DTES looks downright post-apocalyptic), "respect" is definitely not what comes to mind.
I can respect China in spite of it being a very disruptive geopolitical actor because it possesses a level of competence and state capacity that is currently allowing it to eat everybody else’s lunch. I can't, however, respect a country when it seems incapable of fixing simple issues. On a base level, respect at least requires that you be a serious actor capable of getting your affairs in order at home (and abroad), preferably with a telos that amounts to more than simply coasting off your current comfortable position and behaving as if your global standing is so assured that you can tolerate endless inefficiency, dysfunction and policy failure at home.
To be fair this is my opinion on a lot of Europe as well, so Canada certainly isn't the only one being subject to this withering assessment.
Yes, and this is the fault of the War of 1812. The US's invasion of Canada had the perverse outcome of solidifying a Canadian identity as specifically not-American.
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I think this is the general identity crisis in the whole Commonwealth ruled by the king, including Australia and New Zealand. As the British Empire collapsed, so did the overall identity of these countries as having the "civilizing mission" where it was their burden to uplift the world in line with projects such as ending slavery, saving artifacts in Imperial museums, spreading literacy etc. What they came up with was alignment with post WW2 liberal consensus of building multicultural societies, while other countries of commonwealth such as those in Caribbean took upon the identity as anticolonial crusaders.
Now as the mutliculturalism collapses, there is new profound identity crisis. So what is left is pretending to be more sophisticated opposition toward uncouth Americans - this is by the way also the identity of many EU nations as they also see their mutlicutural projects collapsing together with prestige be it economic, scientific, diplomatic or technological.
The whole dynamics reminds me actually of late Austrian empire and its identity as opposition toward militaristic unsophisticated Piefke "Reichsdeutschen" Germans, while at the same time being jealous of German economic dynamism and rise to power. The comparison is uncanny right down to failure of multicultural project as ethnic tensions increased down to bureaucratic paralysis and anemic economy and science as well as tension being supposedly culturally superior while relying on supposedly civilizationally inferior power for protection and growth.
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But then, who isn't? California had those exact fuck-ups, all of them, in the recent past. So does the east coast (albeit a bit further back). And in between them, there's pockets of insane structural poverty,
Australia also seems to do it's best to squander an entire continent full of natural resources while crippling itself politically. With a starting position like that, being China's mine seems to be a substandard outcome. Tragic loss of state capacity seems to be the story all throughout the West.
I'd just take that as a sad fact, and wait for China to shakes us out of that collective stupor (might take a catastrophic loss to accomplish that, so let's not wait in hopeful expectation).
Until then, I try to see the good. With Canada, I associate Bombardier, oil sands infrastructure and CANDU reactors. Universities of Toronto, Waterloo, McGill. They can still built, if they'd wanted to. They'll retain that ability for a while.
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Are you asking how other countries think about Canada?
Well, from Australia, the answer is that we don't, very much. I feel like Canada is the forgotten member of the Anglosphere. We have strong opinions on ourselves, the Kiwis, and of course, the Yanks and the Poms, but not the Canadians. (The fact that the Canadians do not have a silly slang name seems instructive.) If we do think about Canada, it's mostly the idea of Canada as a smaller, somewhat more well-behaved America.
For me personally, I think of Canada as a country halfway between the US and the UK, and most of the news I've heard about it recently has been discouraging - it seems like it's been transforming pretty radically over the last few decades? But in general I think Canada is much 'quieter', so to speak, than either the US or UK. Perhaps that's the inevitable result of being midway between two great powers. Australia is also a colony, but in the context of our immediate neighbourhood, we're pretty influential. Among Oceania or southeast Asia, Australia can be assertive. But Canada is perpetually overshadowed.
Who are the Poms? The English?
Rhyming slang.
Immigrant -> Pomegranate -> Pom
By way of comparison, Yank -> Septic Tank -> Sep or Seppo
I guess I've never heard an Aussie pronounce "pomegranate" but it's hard for me to imagine an accent in which it would rhyme with "immigrant".
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Aussie and Kiwi slang for British people, yes. I have heard it's a shortening of "pomegranate" but not sure if that's just folk etymology.
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You don't call them Canucks and tell jokes about them all being drunken lumberjack hockey fans who live off maple syrup and poutine and expect the government to pay for it all?
No. I don't think those jokes would read.
We just about know that maple syrup comes from Canada, but in general, I think it'd be fair to say that Australians can't tell the difference between Americans and Canadians. That probably sounds ridiculous to you, but then, it sounds ridiculous to me that Americans can't tell the difference between Australians and New Zealanders, even though our accents are totally different.
Actually, US states near the Canadian border are known for maple syrup as well, especially Vermont.
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Nah, there really isn't any sort of clean line between Canada and the US. My western Canadian accent is closer to the western US (California/Washington) than to eastern Canada (Ontario). Our government has spent decades tossing out free speech and free association protections (AFAIK we're the only western nation to have frozen the bank accounts of protestors our dear leader doesn't like), but that doesn't affect foreigners.
Certainly from a distance the impression I have is that the difference between a Washingtonian and a British Columbian, or a Minnesotan and a Manitoban, or a Mainer and a New Brunswicker, is pretty tiny. You could fly from Seattle to Vancouver and they would feel pretty similar. I'm not saying there are no differences, and I think Canadians are closer to Australians than Americans are (if nothing else, as far as I can tell Canadians don't have the American forthrightness or obnoxiousness?), but they are marginal.
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New Zealanders are progressives who can't run an economy and have weird quasi-mid Atlantic accents. Australians have more British accents and could run an economy if they chose to, but they'd rather have short term money. They're both treehuggers in stupid and bureaucratic ways. Sheep joke about New Zealand, not as bad as Wales, and I think they have unusually hardcore parrots? Australia is our main rival for sports nobody cares about and a giant desert with interesting wildlife.
New Zealanders think of themselves as more British than we are, though I think it's much of a muchness. The key difference is that they cannot pronounce vowels properly, whereas we can.
The economy crack does make me laugh a bit - Australia has its problems, but I'm pretty sure we're better at running an economy than the Seppos. I still remember us just dodging the 2008 global financial crisis entirely.
Americans do not think of Australians and New Zealanders as similar(New Zealand is stereotyped as some kind of quaint progressive ruritania, while we tend to see Australia as much more like a normal country).
I’m guessing seppo is a New Zealander?
"Seppo" is an American, derogatory rhyming slang from "Yank" to "Septic Tank".
Though for what it's worth, Pom, Yank, Seppo, etc., are usually intended as affectionate. I would not use them if I really wanted to insult an American or Brit.
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Fine.
If the US didn't exist we wouldn't be having this conversation; if you're a competent Roman, you move to Rome, because that's where the persistent investment is. If no Rome, we'd have to actually get off our asses, but if we did the investment and capital required to do that would turn us into America.
Actual, real, civil minded sacrifice to develop the country in some way (be it industry or otherwise) just isn't there; we can't keep it, and our culture reflects that, though whether the chicken or egg came first is an open question. And from a Western perspective, fuck Ottawa and Montreal, there's zero logical reason they should be making laws for me. I would be OK with sacrificing for an Alberta-based Western government, but the difference is they're not foreigners; Easterners are just as foreign to me as Americans (and even moreso under certain circumstances re: the things you mentioned).
I honestly don't think they think about us at all outside of occasional peacekeeping missions, but we (nor anyone else) have done much of that since the late '90s. I don't think about them either, really; we live on the same island as the Americans do and that means outside of maybe French tourists we don't get too much in the way of international exposure, both the threatening and the non-threatening kind.
To be honest, I'm not even sure how I'd like other nations to think about Canada, and I think that is the average Canadian's viewpoint. Part of that is that decisions that would generate distinction are made by the Empire- British before 1970, American after that.
But we don't have many foreign policy accomplishments or even know where to begin apart from "the Empire is doing this, and we're along for the ride". We accomplish the Empire's objectives far better than they do, but at the end of the day they're still the Empire's objectives. And I think most of the world sees that; and I think Canada is treated less seriously as an international partner because of that.
"Competent, with an asterisk."
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