Trump rhetoric slows Canadian travel to U.S., boosting tourism for Japan and Mexico
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Spring may be right around the corner, but there has been no thawing in Canada-U.S. relations.
Over the past year, Canadian patriotism has soared amid Donald Trump’s “51st state” rhetoric and his references to Prime Minister Mark Carney as the future governor of Canada. So it’s unsurprising that folks have had their elbows up about travelling south of the border.
Last year, Canadian return trips to the United States were down 25.4 per cent from 2024, while overseas trips rose by just over 9 per cent, according to Statistics Canada. The biggest hits were to border crossings by car, but air travel also suffered. While air travel overseas for Canadians was up by over 10 per cent overall, it dropped by 18.7 per cent to the United States in December, for example, while summer months saw around 20 per cent drops in U.S.-bound air travel.
Now, as Canadians embark on 2026 spring break getaways, it seems the not-to-America trend is holding.
“I would be more stressed on the plane going in, anticipating the trip and what might happen during it,” said Tracy Lamourie, a publicist from Toronto, about the U.S.
The decline in Canadian travel is painful for tourist-dependent trade in the U.S., according to Aaron Klein, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
“International tourism is America’s third-largest export. That’s how it counted in GDP … (it’s) a bigger export for America than cars,” Klein said.
Las Vegas bets big on Canada. Canadian tourism is its number one source of international tourists, and it saw a 25 per cent decline in that travel between April and July last year, resulting in the potential loss of $535 million in revenue, according to a report Klein co-authored in October.
The top four states for Canadian visitors in 2024 were New York, Florida, California, and Nevada.
In American areas where Canadians comprised at least one per cent of visitors last year, employment was down roughly six per cent by mid-year, costing an estimated 14,000 to 42,000 jobs nationally.
Would-be travellers to the U.S. mainly point to geopolitics and safety concerns for their hesitancy.
“It just doesn’t feel like a safe holiday destination,” said Lamourie. “It doesn’t seem fun.”
Lamourie, who splits her time between Ontario and Malta throughout the year, said that before 2025, she traveled often to the United States for work and pleasure each year. Now, she prefers to vacation in Europe and sets up overseas work events on the continent instead. She cited border security concerns and safety concerns, given the ICE raids and shootings in Minnesota and elsewhere that have captured international headlines.
Another longtime U.S. visitor, a Canadian media colleague who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she no longer travels south because, as a journalist who has written about Trump, she is concerned that she will be accused of working in the U.S. or having her social media accounts scrutinized.
“I just don’t want to subject myself to this. I just feel it’s rather undignified to be honest,” she said.
It’s not just individual travel that has been affected. Some Canadian schools that would normally plan theatre trips to the Big Apple or skiing trips to Vermont or Colorado have paused or banned student travel to the U.S. amid the trade war, citing safety concerns.
Several other countries, meanwhile, are clearly benefiting from the tourism shift.
According to Airalo, an eSIM store offering digital SIMs for global travellers, activation data from last year showed huge growth of Canadian tourism to France, Japan, and Mexico. So far this year, Airalo says that the top non-U.S. destinations for Canadians are Mexico, Japan, and Thailand.
“Our data confirms a significant shift in Canadian travel patterns, with a 26 per cent year-over-year decrease in U.S.-bound travel,” said Emma Brooks, Airalo’s growth director for North America.
“While the U.S. has historically been a cornerstone for Canadian travelers, we’re seeing a clear pivot toward high-value international destinations. Canadians are … trading short-haul U.S. trips for bucket-list destinations like Japan and France.”
Meanwhile, January saw Canadian return trips from the U.S. fall 24.3 per cent from January 2025, and February was the 14th consecutive month for a decline in return trips at a rate 14.5 per cent lower than February 2025, according to Statistics Canada.
February also saw the lowest level of Canadian return trips by car from the U.S. in nearly four years, matching pandemic-era rates.
“Even if you’re not looking at geopolitics, even if you’re not looking at the war, even if you’re not worried about being questioned at the border, … it’s just objectively not a place we’d be choosing to go to,” said Lamourie.
National Post
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