Last September, Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley made a direct appeal to Canadian travelers. “As the mayor of Las Vegas, I’m telling everybody in Canada, please come. We love you, we need you, and we miss you.”
The city had watched Canadian arrivals fall from 1.4 million in 2024 to just under 1.2 million in 2025, a 17.4% drop, per data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
As reported in Fortune, that kind of decline has been playing out across the U.S. generally. Canadian government data put the overall year-over-year drop in visits to the U.S. at 25% for 2025. But new analysis from the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, published Tuesday, using cell phone activity data, puts the median decline in Canadian visits to U.S. metropolitan areas at 42%, sharper than what the headline figures had suggested.
What stands out in the University of Toronto data isn’t just the scale of the drop, it’s where it showed up. The declines weren’t concentrated in tourist-heavy cities like Orlando or Las Vegas. Dallas, which has a significant Canadian financial presence, Scotiabank opened a regional headquarters there in early 2026, joining RBC, BMO, and CIBC, and saw a nearly 50% year-over-year decline in Canadian visitors. Grand Rapids, Mich., which is closely linked to Canada’s automotive industry and named Vaughan, Ontario as a sister city earlier this month, was down 53%.
“The story these numbers tell us is that it’s not just tourist travel — a lot of it is tourist travel — but there’s other travel that’s hurt as well.”
— Karen Chapple, co-author, University of Toronto School of Cities
Chapple, who directs the School of Cities, sees the travel pullback connected to the broader boycott of American goods that’s taken hold among Canadians since President Trump imposed a 25% tariff on most Canadian imports over a year ago.
Trump’s remarks about Canada becoming the 51st state have added to the friction. A Politico poll of 2,000 Canadian adults conducted in February found 58% no longer considered the U.S. a reliable ally. “It’s probably driven by a feeling that, if we’re going to boycott in our personal lives, let’s do it in our work lives too,” said Karen. The economic damage has already started showing up in employment data. The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that by mid-2025, U.S. businesses with the highest share of Canadian visitors had roughly 6% fewer employees, compared to less-exposed establishments — a loss estimated between 14,000 and 42,000 jobs in those markets.
Business travel is a disproportionately valuable slice of the total. It accounts for about 20% of trips to the U.S. but roughly 60% of air and lodging revenue, according to the U.S. Travel Association — a consequence of business travelers spending more on hotels, conference space, and dining than leisure travelers, who are often staying with family or friends.
One complicating factor is that Canadian investment in U.S. assets hasn’t slowed. From January to May 2025, Canadian investors made net purchases of $59.9 billion Canadian dollars ($43.3 billion USD) in U.S. equities and debt This is the largest such sum in a year-to-date period since at least 1990, according to National Bank of Canada Financial Markets. This limits any claim that a full economic decoupling is underway, but Chapple isn’t dismissive of where the trend could lead.
“It is indicative of a beginning of a shift that could continue,” she said. “Hard to say.”
