Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently accepted an award for being world statesman of the year and it seems the planet thinks he might have deserved it.
A new poll from Ipsos Global conducted for the Halifax International Security Forum has found the world believes Canada will have the most positive impact on global affairs in the coming decade of any of the major nations and organizations included in the survey.
Citizens of countries on every inhabited continent were surveyed about whether certain nations and organizations would have a positive or negative effect in the coming years. Fully 82 per cent of respondents thought Canada would have a strongly positive or somewhat positive impact, up 3 per cent since the last time the survey was conducted.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay opened the security summit for which the poll was commissioned in Halifax on Friday. Government, military, business and academic leaders from more than 50 counties are meeting to discuss global affairs.
They will undoubtedly be discussing the escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas, which in the past week has seen rocket attacks on Israeli cities answered with airstrikes on Gaza.
Israel did not fare so well in the poll. See how it stacked up in the slideshow below.
