Majority of Canadians insulted while U.S. ambassador calls 51st state rhetoric a compliment: poll

U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra during the Global Business Forum in Banff, Alberta, on Sept.25, 2025. Photo by Brent Calver /Postmedia

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More than three quarters of Canadians disagree with U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra’s assertion that President Donald Trump’s call for Canada to become the 51st state is a compliment and a term of endearment, according to a new poll.

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Seventy-eight per cent of the Canadians surveyed earlier this month disagree with Hoekstra and “instead believe that such language is insulting to Canadians.” Only 11 per cent agree with him, according to the poll from Narrative Research and the Logit Group.

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“Just one in ten agree that suggesting Canada should become the 51st state is a compliment and a term of endearment,” said a statement from the pollsters.

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“One in ten are unsure or did not express an opinion.”

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Asa McKercher, the Hudson Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations at St. Francis Xavier University’s Brian Mulroney Institute of Government, is not surprised by the results.

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“Canada’s sort of very existence is due to people basically rejecting becoming American,” said McKercher, an associate professor of public policy and governance in Antigonish, N.S.

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English and French residents of this country united “to throw back the Americans during their invasion in the American Revolution and the War of 1812,” he said Wednesday.

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And they voted to become a colony “rather than joining or welcoming annexation in the 1860s,” McKercher said.

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He pointed out that in the Newfoundland referendum of 1948 people living on The Rock opted to join Canada, even though “one of the options was to vote to appeal to become an American state,” he said.

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“So, this is something that’s united Canadians basically through our entire existence on the northern half of North America.”

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On the 11 per cent of Canadians who agree that Hoekstra’s comment is a compliment and a term of endearment, McKercher said it could be interpreted that way.

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“It is a compliment, in a sense, I guess, in that Americans have this kind of typical view that everyone wants to be American. So, I suppose that is a kind of a compliment, if you like.”

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For McKercher, “the interesting number” from the poll comes from Gen Z (people aged 18 to 24), with 27 per cent of them agreeing that Canada becoming the 51st state should be taken as a compliment.

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“Maybe they have less attachment to what Canada is,” he said.

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“Obviously the economy has not been kind to them — the cost-of-living crisis. I think there’s a sense, quite rightly, that per capita incomes in much of the United States are higher,” McKercher said.

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The political scientist, who lives in Nova Scotia, noted that his province’s per capita income was below that of Mississippi in a recent study from the Fraser Institute. “So, for younger people, Canada hasn’t been the land of opportunity that it necessarily has been certainly for baby boomers and even Gen Xers,” he said.