Posthaste: Canadians are paying more than lip service to Buy Canada — and now the numbers prove it
There’s been a lot of talk about the Buy Canadian movement since the protest first sprung up at the onset of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war , but is it all talk?
Not according to a recent study by the Bank of Canada.
Central bank researchers tapped three sets of data that confirm Canadians have indeed been shifting away from their neighbours to the south by increasing their spending on domestic travel and Canadian grocery products and reducing their spending on similar U.S. products and services.
Historically the United States has been one of the most popular travel destinations for Canadians, but that has changed since trade tensions flared between the two countries, said the study.
Canadians took almost 10 million or 25 per cent fewer trips to the United States last year. The biggest drop was in trips across the border by land which fell by 8.4 million or 30 per cent. Trips by air were down 1.2 million or 12 per cent.
Data from Statistics Canada show that Canadians are now spending their money on travelling within Canada and to international destinations other than the U.S. Canadians took four per cent more trips domestically and spent about 10 per cent more in Canada on travel and tourism between the first and third quarters of 2025 as the “Buy Canadian movement gained momentum.”
Getting numbers on how Canadians are spending their money in the grocery store is more difficult so the researchers turned to the NielsenIQ Homespun Consumer panel.
This data involves 10,000 Canadian households each month scanning the barcodes of their purchases, three quarters of which are groceries. Using the barcode to determine where the product was licensed, researchers were able to trace, though admittedly imperfectly, its country of origin.
The shift from spending on U.S. products to Canadian goods is “modest but clearly visible,” they said.
In March 2025 when trade tensions escalated as Trump launched his tariff war , food spending on Canadian products jumped two percentage points compared to January of that year. The share spent on U.S. goods fell by a similar amount.
“And what started in March wasn’t short-lived — it persisted through the summer,” said the report.
The shift in spending was larger in some categories, especially coffee and fruit juices. Researchers said some of this may be due to counter-tariffs imposed by Canada which made some U.S. goods, such as orange juice, more expensive. Most of those tariffs have since been dropped.
The Buy Canadian movement remains strong, however.
Canadians made their preference for homegrown goods and services clear in the central bank’s latest consumer survey in the fourth quarter of 2025. More than a third of respondents said they plan to increase their spending on domestic travel. Almost half said they will be reducing their spending on travel to the United States.
Trade tensions over the past year have pushed the Canadian economy into structural change, with supply chains and domestic production shifting away from the U.S. and exporters finding new partnerships, said the study.
Monitoring spending patterns is important because the movement could actually be affecting the economy.
“Should Canadian consumers continue to prefer domestic products over U.S. goods and services, this spending shift could not only affect the composition of Canada’s gross domestic product but also have an impact on inflationary pressures,” it said.
Apart from the Bank of Canada study, Buy Canadian is showing up in other data.
Foreign direct investment into this country hit $96.8 billion in 2025, the highest annual inflows in almost 20 years.
The United Kingdom boosted its exposure, snapping up Canadian software companies ranging from cybersecurity to AI-powered asset management, “suggesting U.K. investors see Canadian tech as both promising and a natural gateway to North American markets,” said Maria Solovieva, an economist with Toronto Dominion Bank.
“With Canada pursuing more incremental engagements with other partners, including the most recent PM’s announcement of visits to India, Australia, and Japan, we may see a more diversified flow of direct investment towards the second half of the year. A trend worth watching,” she said.
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One year into Trump’s tariff tactics, the United States has won a few battles, but it hasn’t won the trade war, said Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets.
In December, the U.S. trade deficit rose unexpectedly to a five-month high of $70.3 billion as exports fell for the second month in a row and imports rose.
For all of 2025, the good and services trade deficit slipped slightly from a record shortfall in 2024, but it was the services surplus that did the work, said Guatieri. The U.S. goods deficit grew by more than two per cent to a record high.
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Today’s Posthaste was written by Pamela Heaven with additional reporting from Financial Post staff and Bloomberg.
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