Stefanie Ricchio has been taking her kids to New York City since they were newborns.
“It’s a special place for us and a tradition for my daughter,” says the Toronto-based chartered professional accountant. To celebrate her daughter’s birthday each April, they travel to the city to watch a Yankees game at Yankee Stadium.
But this year, while they still made the trip, they kept quiet about it.
“I felt like this is not really something that I want to broadcast because I feel like I shouldn’t be spending my money there,” she says. “There’s that conflict of (being a) super-proud Canadian, but also these are our traditions and memories that mean something to my daughter that I didn’t want to give up.”
Ricchio is referring to the reluctance — by now, a grassroots national resistance — of Canadians traveling to the United States. Alongside the buy-Canadian movement, which started when US President Donald Trump first started imposing tariffs in March 2025 and continues to today, Canadians also changed their travel plans.
In 2024, Canadians made 39 million return trips across the US-Canada border. Then the tariffs and 51st state mentions began and that number contracted — sharply. There were year-over-year declines in Canadians traveling to the US for 15 consecutive months until April 2026. The 2026 Canadian Travel and Tourism Outlook study from Environics Research shows that six in 10 Canadians are either actively avoiding travel to the US (46%) or would travel to the US, but feel conflicted (15%).
This summer, however, there was a slow but steady increase of Canadians crossing the border, according to Statistics Canada, though numbers were still 25.6% lower than in the same time period in 2024. Like Ricchio, they are traveling to sports games, concerts and theme parks. Many of them, however, aren’t posting their trips on social media or talking about the holidays with friends because the “elbows up” sentiment still prevails.
“If I did have to tell somebody that I was going, I felt a little bit of angst. Are they judging me? Saying, ‘You could just watch the Yankees play here in Toronto,’” she says.
Kemi Wells-Conrad, founder and president of Wells Luxury Travel, a travel agency in Vancouver, says her travelers are falling into two categories.
Recent tensions between the two countries have led some of her clients to restrict US travel entirely, canceling US trips they may have planned and even avoiding layovers at US airports.
Others, particularly those traveling with family, are “still going,” she says.
“Because Hawaii, for example, is so good with family resorts and it might be their annual tradition, or some of them have a home in Arizona or one of the Hawaiian islands.
“I definitely had people saying, ‘Oh, I’m not telling my friends I’m going,’ or ‘not posting on social media that I’m going,’” Wells-Conrad says.
But she explains that they tend to separate Hawaii, in particular, from the rest of the US. “Even though, of course, it’s part of the United States, people do see it differently with the different culture.”
Barry Choi, a personal finance and loyalty program expert in Toronto, travels to the US for both work and fun. When the tensions between Canada and the US first started, he kept quiet about the trips, but now he shares both on his Instagram account to more than 12,000 followers — something he’s gotten backlash for.
“The reality is, I’m not going to the US to visit Donald Trump. I go there to see friends, family, and things that we don’t have here in Canada. If there was like a Disney World in Vaughan,” he says, referring to a suburb of Toronto, “of course I wouldn’t go to Orlando. Or if my friends and family lived here in Canada rather than Miami, California, New York, there’d be no reason to go.”
He decided to start posting these travels publicly because he thought it worthwhile to share with those who follow his social media accounts what the experience is like for Canadians.
“I was in the Palm Beaches, and every single local I talked to, as soon as I told them I’m from Canada, apologized for the president,” Choi says. “They’re like, “I didn’t vote for him. Most people here do not like him. I found that to be a bit shocking, to be honest.”
The tariffs and tensions are affecting people on both sides of the border, he says. “I do feel like the people there are feeling the same struggles as us.”
Still, some who have ventured across the border have decided it’s not worth it.
Caleigh, a marketing executive in Toronto who didn’t want her last name published for fear of backlash, recently drove across the border to watch a Hayley Williams concert in upstate New York, but kept quiet about the trip.
“I know that my family is very much like against it, and friends are apprehensive,” she says of US travel.
She had considered not going at all and listing the tickets for resale.
“All of the Lake Ontario rhetoric was a week or so before the concert, and then more tariffs were put into place, so there was a heightened sense of everything going on,” she says. The plan was to drive across with a friend, but they wondered, “Is the border going to be stricter now?”
In the end, she and a friend drove to the show. Normally, she would have posted her road trip and the concert to her social media, but she didn’t post at all during the journey. Part of it was not wanting people who follow her to know she had gone, the other reason was concern over having her phone searched at the border.
While her phone wasn’t searched going into the US, her car was.
“As a family, we used to go to upstate New York quite a lot growing up, and (this time) felt completely different. They were doing flashlight searches of all the cars, no matter what,” she says. “The vibe has completely shifted. The kind of scrutiny has completely shifted.”
As a result, she doesn’t plan on making another trip — whether she keeps quiet about it or not.
