Today, the National Capital Commission is pumping up a survey carried out by Leger Marketing that looks at how Ottawa compares to other world capitals.

The survey, which the NCC co-released with the Association for Canadian Studies, is in conjunction with Horizon 2067, the commission's far-reaching plan to ask Canadians how they want their nation's capital to grow and evolve.

Of course, what media seem to really have latched on to are a couple of slides that allegedly show Canadians hating Toronto more than any other major city in the country. Shocking, I know! See here, here, here, and here for some examples.

Oh, and Ottawa is also being called the most-liked city too. But are both of those claims accurate? Here are the two pages of the report most media outlets are focusing on:

The first slide shows that 82 percent of the 2,345 people surveyed had a "very positive" or "somewhat positive" reaction to the nation's capital. Compare that to Toronto: only 73 percent of Canadians felt the same way about the nation's largest city.

So should we be lording that over our Toronto neighbours whenever they grudgingly make the jaunt up the 401? Well, I guess that depends on how excited we should be that nearly half the respondents have a "somewhat positive" attitude towards Ottawa.

Personally, I think a more meaningful statistic is that 35 percent of those polled had a "very positive" reaction towards the nation's capital—which puts us for fourth among the nine cities looked at, behind Victoria, Vancouver and Quebec City. Because that's what cities should be aiming for: greatness. And 29 percent of respondents felt the same way about Toronto, placing them in a tie with Calgary and putting them four percentage points above Edmonton—in other words, not last.

I'd add that the "very negative" responses are instructional, too, because they also show how passionate Canadians feel about particular places. According to the Leger survey, it's Toronto and Montreal that generate the most purely negative feelings. And that's not particularly surprising, since whatever you feel about the two cities, they're pretty hard to ignore, what with arguably being the cultural centres of English and French Canada and all.

Only two percent of people had a "very negative" response to Ottawa, by the way. Make of that what you will.

Anyways, without even getting into whether a more meaningful survey might limit the questions to people who've actually visited the cities they're commenting on, let's give the final word to the NCC. It's the first paragraph of their press release, and it's probably what they hoped people would take away from the survey:

Today the National Capital Commission and the Association for Canadian Studies released survey data which found that a plurality of Canadians feel that the most important roles for the Capital is to represent Canada to the world and to the country. Canada’s Capital also ranked highest among international capital cities according to respondents in 4 countries surveyed.

If you want to see the entire poll, you can download the data from the ACS website here.

Photo by dougtone on Flickr