Canadians are staying away from the US — and the drop in travel is getting hard to ignore

• Fewer Canadians are visiting the US.
• One economist said that's due to rhetoric around a "51st state," and an immigration crackdown.
• Weaker travel demand from Canadians can affect local US economies.

Canadians aren't visiting the US as much as they used to.

Data from Statistics Canada up to November showed that fewer Canadians returned from the US — indicating fewer visited the US — than in the past couple of years.

Julian Karaguesian, a visiting lecturer in the economics department at McGill University in Montreal and former special advisor in the International Trade and Finance Branch in the Department of Finance Canada, told Business Insider that several factors are contributing to reduced Canadian travel to the US, including an immigration crackdown and President Donald Trump's rhetoric on both trade and turning the country into the 51st US state.

"We started to see from summer onwards, a lot of protests, a lot of activity by ICE, rhetoric and talk about calling in the National Guard to clean up cities," Karaguesian said. "I think that scared away a lot of tourists."

The number of Canadians returning from the US plunged during the pandemic, and never truly recovered to its pre-pandemic average. After some recovery, it took a massive slip in early 2025 and is down about a quarter from a year ago in November. Statistics Canada data also showed that US residents entering Canada haven't had as large a drop from the start of the year as Canadian residents returning did.

Meanwhile, Canadians are doubling down on what Canada has to offer. Statistics Canada said domestic travel in the second quarter of 2025 was 10.9% higher than a year ago. Over a third of the domestic travel was characterized as holiday, leisure, and recreation trips.

Karaguesian expects Canadian travel to the US to continue to cool due to the "Buy Canadian" movement, political instability, the trade war, and recent violence in the US.

Prioritizing Canadian goods was one of the ways Justin Trudeau, now the former prime minister, encouraged residents after the trade war between the US and Canada began. Discouraging US travel was another.

"We're going to choose to not go on vacation in Florida or Old Orchard Beach or wherever," Trudeau said. "We're going to choose to try to buy Canadian products and forgo bourbon and other classic American products."

The decline in Canadian tourists can affect US businesses that rely on them to prosper.

A report from the Democratic members of the Congress Joint Economic Committee included different business owners describing how the fall in Canadian tourism to the US has affected them.

"We spoke with Canadian customers who told us point-blank that they were hesitant to cross due to the current political tension," Kyle Daley, owner of supermarket Soloman's Store in New Hampshire, said in the report. "The joy of the 'shopping day trip' has been replaced by anxiety over border enforcement and tariffs."

Daley added that "When our neighbors stay away, our margins disappear and in groceries those margins are vanishingly small to begin with."

U.S. Travel Association said Canada is the main driver for the expected 3.2% drop in international inbound travel spending from 2024 to 2025.

Karaguesian said the effects would be felt more by local economies. That can include Michigan, Vermont, and other areas along the border.

"The longer-term ramifications are that our economy will suffer and that businesses will close and people will lose their jobs, which is just terrible," Becca Brown McKnight, a city councilor in Burlington, Vermont, previously told Business Insider. "We are really lucky in Vermont to have a robust small business economy; a lot of these are mom and pop shops, and this is people's entire livelihood."

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said that the state and Canada's "economies are intertwined" in response to a question at a fireside chat about why Canada should trust the state "in the midst of a chaotic tariff policy."

Sandy Levine, the owner of some restaurants in the Detroit area, said in a WDET article published in June that "We certainly still see people from Canada and from other countries, but it's not nearly to the degree that it was maybe like six months ago or a year ago."

Karaguesian thinks that if the White House had simply focused on arguing for tariffs to rebuild the US manufacturing sector without harming Canada, then the administration "could achieve the same thing and not have put off so many Canadians through a mixture of pride and fear."