º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍø

Dan Arnold, chief strategy officer for Pollara, who worked in the Prime Minister’s Office during Trump’s first term, said even he was struck by that finding.

It means that Canadians’ growing antipathy to Trump’s America has now exploded into a credibility problem, too. A lot of Canadians are not only ill-disposed to Trump, according to this poll, but they fundamentally distrust any dealing he would have with Carney.

“It’s not because we don’t care. We just don’t believe them,� Arnold said.

As Arnold put it, even if some people in Canada are holding their breath for what another trade deal with Trump would involve, few would be exhaling even if a deal is landed. The distrust now goes that deep.

In New York on Monday, Carney told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that Canada is indeed in the midst of a massive reset with the United States, and gave no indication he expected the relationship to go back to anything like it was.

“This is not a transition, this is a rupture. This is a sharp change in a short period of time,� he said.

One person who won’t like the distrust on display in the new Pollara results is Trump’s new ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, who went public last week with his frustration about Canadians’ current attitudes toward Trump and the United States more generally.

“I’m disappointed that I came to Canada, a Canada (where) it is very, very difficult to find Canadians who are passionate about the American-Canadian relationship,� Hoekstra told a luncheon in Halifax last week.

Pollara, like other polling firms, is finding that Canadians are actually feeling passionate about all things Canada-U.S., just not in the way the ambassador might prefer. And they’re acting on that passion, which is also a break from the more low-level animosity that may have dotted Canadians’ history.

Almost three-quarters of respondents told Pollara in this most recent poll that they have taken some kind of personal action to protest against Trump and his tariff war with Canada.

A full 52 per cent said they were exercising boycotts in the grocery store, and 38 per cent said they were doing the same with non-grocery items, too. Meanwhile, 30 per cent said they had changed travel plans to the United States.

Pollara carried out this survey from Sept. 11 to 16 among 2,712 Canadian adults. Online surveys such as this don’t generate a margin of error, but a sample of this size would be considered accurate within 1.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Conservatives here in Canada have been poking away at Carney’s failure to come to a new trade deal with Trump, arguing — correctly — that he campaigned as the man most likely to be able to make such a deal with the president. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been taking every opportunity to remind his listeners that Carney isn’t delivering on that promise. 

But if the Pollara poll is correct, Canadians who may have been in a hurry for a deal in spring have settled instead into sharp skepticism about why Carney should bother anyway. Canada has been picking away at trying to solve irritants in the Canada-U.S. trade deal, but it is taking a steady, low-key approach to getting full renegotiations underway.

Last week, public consultations were launched in advance of the review coming next year for the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade deal, but none of the three countries made a big deal of that development.

Pollara also found that 48 per cent of respondents approved of how Carney was handling Canada-U.S. relations, compared to 36 per cent who disapproved.

A couple of provincial governments fared somewhat better, with more than half of Ontarians saying they like how Doug Ford’s government was handling things and Manitobans lodging solid approval for Premier Wab Kinew’s management of relations.

Interestingly, the government logging the highest disapproval ratings was Alberta’s, where Premier Danielle Smith has adopted a more conciliatory tone. A lot of Albertans don’t appear onside with that approach, with 48 per cent saying they disapproved of Alberta’s Canada-U.S. management and only 36 per cent approving.

If nothing else, the poll also explains why the Liberal cabinet was told at its retreat earlier this month that Canadians are more worried about issues closer to home than the threats posed by Trump.

They could well be saying they want some results in their lives, but ones they can trust.