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Simon: What do I picture when I think of Canada?
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Simon: My name is Simon Anholt and I'm a policy advisor.
I've been interested in the mysteries of why people
perceive countries the way they do.
So the Nation Brands Index
is something I've been doing since 2005
and it's a very large-scale international opinion poll.
Canadians are the people that most people in the world
would like to be friends with.
Basically, if people around the world would like to be friends
with a citizen of your country, it means
in a very profound sense, that they approve of your country
and it's a fair bet they would also like to visit it,
they'd like to buy your products.
So everybody loves a Canadian.
The Australians do slightly better than the Canadians,
because they're perceived to have a sense of humour
and the Canadians aren't.
This is all very unfair, I know.
Really, rather a lot of people don't know anything at all
about Canada, the only thing they know about it,
is that it's not America.
The cliché, the brand image if you'd like, of Canada
is little more than America through the looking glass.
And America's the bad guy and Canada's the good guy.
This is what public opinion does,
it turns these wonderful, complex things called
Nation States into something little better
than a commercial brand image.
Something very simple, very naïve, probably out of date,
possibly untrue, but massively over-simplified.
I'm enormously skeptical about this word "brand"
when it's applied to countries and I'm particularly skeptical
about the word "branding".
Branding sounds scarily like a promise,
you can't do international propaganda.
Nobody's listening, nobody believes you,
and nobody cares.
If you want to improve the image of the country,
that if you contribute regularly and meaningfully
and in a way that's relevant to people, then over time,
we're talking about decades and generations here,
the country will earn a better reputation.
Around about 2014, after I've been running this survey
for 9 years, I decided I was gonna take some time out.
I tried to find out whether, in fact, the world's population
weren't somehow silently asking for something else.
Indeed, they were.
They were asking to be good.
More than any other factor, what makes people admire country A
more than country B is the perception that the country
is a good country.
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Canada, as you would expect, does very well
and Canadians on the whole can feel very proud,
it could do more, um, as could every country on the list.
The interesting thing is that Canada is actually perceived
to do slightly more good than it really does.
If we look at climate change, Canada is regarded as being
one of the greenest countries on Earth, which is not true.
Canada is actually quite a serious polluter.
You have to prompt people before they will remember
the great cities of Toronto, Vancouver, and so forth.
So they are thinking of mountains and snow and conifers.
It's all white and green, so it's very pure,
and so they must be really environmentally friendly.
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Simon: The problems that we're facing, uh, today,
these are problems which no single country,
is capable of tackling on its own.
Countries need to cooperate and collaborate
in order for humanity to survive the next few generations.
I just don't want to live in a competitive country anymore,
what I want is, I want to live in a good country.
This is the demand that Canadians should be making,
so that you're not just good neighbours,
you're also good ancestors.
Not make us richer, or all those things.
It should be, "make us gooder."
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