The number of Canadians travelling to the United States in February dropped year-over-year from 2025 to 2026, numbers from Statistics Canada show.
Canadian-resident return trips, or the number of Canadian residents returning home from the U.S., fell 14.5 per cent in Feb. 2026 from Feb. 2025, and 31.5 per cent from Feb. 2024. Return trips by vehicle at land border crossings decreased by 12.9 per cent from Feb. 2025, and return trips by air fell by 17.6 per cent.
It’s affected business in some North Dakota cities popular with road-tripping Manitobans.
“We’re down about 20 per cent compared to the year before,” Visit Fargo-Moorhead marketing director Dannielle Melquist said of the area’s Canadian visitor cohort.
The tourism development organization tracked 5.7 million visitor days in 2025, with roughly 1 million of those coming from Canadian visitors.
“Definitely our hotel partners are seeing an impact. Our sports tournaments can see some differences if teams don’t want to travel down to the States, as well as any stores or local boutiques,” Melquist said.
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Visit Fargo-Moorhead ran an advertising campaign in November and December 2025 encouraging Canadians to travel to the area for holiday shopping, and Melquist says they plan to run another campaign ahead of the summer travel season.
“We know there’s other external forces that are at work, too, just as far as the Canadian dollar versus the U.S. dollar and just how expensive things are getting just for anyone to travel, anyway,” Melquist said.
The decrease in border crossings has had a significant impact on Simon Resch’s family business, the Emerson Duty-Free Shop, where traffic and sales are down 50-75 per cent from typical pre-pandemic rates.
“We don’t expect it to come back in the near future,” Resch told Global News.
Resch said the shop saw traffic resume to pre-pandemic levels in August 2024, but it didn’t last long: U.S. President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods on Feb. 1, 2025.
The Statistics Canada data, released March 10, shows Canadians are still travelling, just less frequently to the United States. Overseas arrivals were up 7.2 per cent in February 2026, and more Canadian residents returned from overseas by air than crossed at U.S. land borders during the month of February 2026.
In a statement to Global News, the Winnipeg Airports Authority (WAA) said travel to the U.S. decreased 8 per cent in 2025, and continues to trend downward in 2026. The WAA attributed the dip to “tariffs and geopolitical tensions,” and said travel from the U.S. to Canada has not changed in the same time period.
In February, WestJet announced it would suspend 16 Canada-U.S. routes due to decreased demand, including Winnipeg’s direct connections to Atlanta and Nashville.
The airline announced direct flights from Winnipeg to Keflavik, Iceland and Liberia, Costa Rica in 2025.
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
