Name: Canadians are avoiding the U.S. Will its economy suffer? | About That
Uploaded: 2025-04-29T07:52:08.000Z
Duration: 11 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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So, there's been a lot of talk from Canadians saying, I don't want to go to the U.S. anymore.

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This week we were planning on going, but we decided to make a different decision.

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You know, they're poking us in the eye, so we've got to poke them back.

And there are surveys too, when more than 60% of people said they planned to avoid travel to the U.S. this year entirely.

It's been harder to know how real this apprehension was until now.

The drop is significant, and Americans have noticed in a big way.

Canadian airlines are taking away flights to popular U.S. cities, this after many Canadian vacationers apparently are avoiding the U.S.

This is having not only a negative impact on the tourism market, but business as a whole.

We're seeing pretty seismic developments in terms of the number of people that are willing to go to the U.S. right now.

And here's the thing, more Canadians pour into the U.S. every year than people from any other country in the world.

So, we wanted to know just how much does this drop actually hurt the U.S.?

The moment data started to show something real was happening here.

This red line shows how many people travel by land from Canada to the U.S. between October and February of this year.

Compared to the orange line, which is last year's travel data.

Superimposing the lines like this, you can see how this year's travel numbers have actually been higher than the previous years since October.

But then the two lines split apart from each other in February.

Which was, if you think back, right around the time the U.S. and Canada began phase one of a fresh trade fight.

The White House confirming tonight that a 25% tariff on Canadian imports will take effect on Tuesday.

Canadians are fully united from coast to coast to coast to stand up for this extraordinary and beautiful country.

And brand new Canadian data seems to show this sharp downturn in travel actually accelerated in March with a 32% drop in Canadian return trips from the U.S. by car year over year.

Which is also the lowest number of Canadians coming back over the border since 2022.

When Canadians really had good reasons to stay home.

With COVID testing, vaccine mandates, cross-border quarantine measures still in place.

A lot of people obviously voting with their wallets and saying, you know what, we're going to stay closer to home.

We're not going to spend our hard-earned money there while we deal with Trump's tariffs and Trump's 51st detente.

And the drop in Canadians booking flights to the U.S. is pretty substantial too.

According to the travel agency Flight Centre, 40% fewer Canadians booked vacations to American cities in February.

And one in five Canadians actually cancelled their trips to the U.S. over the past three months.

After I get cancellation emails from my clients, some of whom have been my clients for over two decades, I come back to them like, guys, it's Trump, right?

It's politics, it's policy, it's he being mean.

And is that why the cancellations are happening?

And they're coming back to me, it's a thousand percent, a thousand percent, it's Trump's policies and politics, and we're sorry.

And airlines are noticing, some allocating tens of thousands fewer seats from Canada to the U.S. this April.

United Airlines even going so far as to cancel a new daily route between Toronto and L.A. that it had planned to start up in May.

So here's where the problem becomes really real.

Because Canada-U.S. travel was supposed to have been ramping up, right?

And as we've been approaching the busiest time of year, the summer months, what happens if this drop keeps dropping?

I mean, we're going to feel it, a big impact in our pocket end of the season if they're not show up this year.

Travel Association, in 2024, about 20 million Canadians either drove or flew south, and the majority of them to either New York, Florida, Arizona, Texas, or California.

Even local officials in Las Vegas are saying, what's going on with Canada right now is a problem for us and growth opportunities for us.

Because, just think about it, every single activity that these Canadian visitors book, every meal they eat, every hotel they stay at, that's money being pumped into the U.S. economy.

Last year, Canadians spent over 20 billion U.S. dollars in the United States.

That's twice as much as what Americans spent at McDonald's in 2024, and almost as much as what the entire U.S. gym and fitness industry pulls in each year.

And not only does this amount of money help fuel local business, it also creates jobs.

Travel Association estimates about 140,000 of them.

So what happens when some of that money starts to disappear?

To give you an idea in like, like actual dollar dollar bills, 2024, my company grossed $35,000 exclusively from Canadian high school kids coming to New York City for their class trip. 2025, 5,000 and going down because I still get cancellations every other week.

I hire 15 tour guides and they all work for me as well as other companies.

My inability to hire them to do what they love, which is share their passion and their energy and their excitement about the greatest city in the world, it sucks, man.

And some American businesses make so much money off Canadians, they've actually built their entire business models around them.

Richard Clauvet looks forward to Canadian snowbirds coming to Florida every year.

Canadians have filled his motels for the past 35 years, but this year was different.

With Canadians right now, we're about 30 percent.

When we should be like more like around 80 percent.

To put this in broader terms, it's estimated about 1 million Canadians, mostly retired, travel to the U.S. every winter.

And that group, they're not just staying for days, even weeks.

Many of them spend months, if not half the year south of the border, which creates an expectation from local businesses that they, and their money, keep coming.

If you have, you know, approximately a million snowbirds going away, they're spending money on vacation rentals when they go there.

So you're talking in the billions of dollars.

And think about the little guy, the smaller vacation towns close to the border that might feel the financial impact the most.

About 130,000 people live there full time.

But figure, up to six times that many Canadians, 600,000 people visit every year, both in the summer and in the winter.

We've seen individual families choosing not to come.

We've heard of hockey, whole hockey teams, choosing not to come to some of our international sporting events.

And then some group travel bookings, bus tours, etc. have also canceled.

This is from a local Adirondack newspaper referring to a survey suggesting 66% of businesses in the area have already seen a decrease in Canadian bookings for 2025.

And their regional tourism office figures, with even just a 20% drop in Canadian visitors, businesses in the area would see a decrease of $12 million in spending.

A lot of communities that are really dependent on Canadian tourism are really suffering right now.

And let's drill down even more, because forget big, splashy vacations.

Think about Canadians living right along the border who don't necessarily even think about the U.S. as a destination, per se, because they're just driving across the border to go to Target or Trader Joe's or to, I don't know, hit a mall, see a concert, go to a ballgame.

Do you think of Walden Galleria in Buffalo?

I mean, you look at the licensed plates in the parking lot and there are a lot of Ontario plates there each and every day.

They're almost entirely dependent on Canadians and Canadian tourism and day-trippers who just go for a few hours and spend their money there.

And do not underestimate the importance of this.

Because, just to give you one example, county executives in that Buffalo-Niagara area say, in February, their records show a 7% decrease in sales tax revenue.

That, they say, is at least in part because there are fewer Canadians paying sales tax.

Certainly in my hometown of Buffalo, Canadians come over all the time and they go to our sporting events, they shop in our stores, so sales tax revenues are dropping already.

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Canadians are avoiding the U.S. Will its economy suffer? | About That

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