As U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued threat of tariffs looms, new data shows fewer people are travelling from B.C. to the United States.
Data provided by Cascade Gateway, which also provides border wait times, shows that in February this year so far, there have been on average 3,500 cars heading to the U.S. through the Peace Arch border crossing.
That is compared to almost 5,000 a day last February.
“It’s early days,” border policy researcher at Western Washington University, Laurie Trautman, told Global News.
“But the numbers that we can look at suggests around a 30-per cent decrease in southbound travel for the month of February. That certainly isn’t all attributable to just Canadians and we did have that pretty big snowstorm in early February. So it’s a little hard to tease out completely what the impact of the tariff threats might be.
“But if we combine the numbers with kind of what we’re seeing on the ground, I think it does sort of point to impacts from those threats.”
Trautman also said that with business leaders and politicians pushing for Canadians to buy local, that message might also be having an impact.
Trump, who spoke to the media during the first meeting of his newly-appointed cabinet, was asked if he would consider pausing or stopping the tariffs given the border security measures recently put in place by both of the U.S.’s neighbours.
Get breaking National news
For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen.
“I’m not stopping the tariffs,” Trump told reporters, adding that he was concerned about the fentanyl crisis facing the United States.
However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was also present at the meeting, clarified that Trump was talking about two separate sets of tariffs.
The first is the fentanyl-related 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which are set to hit on March 4. The second set of tariffs are reciprocal tariffs on all of America’s trading partners, which Trump said will go into effect on April 2.
However, just as Bridgitte Anderson, president and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade said, Trautman agrees that the damage has been done.
“People are angry and justifiably so,” she said.
“And so even if April 2nd comes around and we don’t see tariffs, I don’t know that that’s going to move the needle back to where it was. I think people are still going to have that lingering frustration.”
Trautman said some of the drop in border crossings could be attributed to Trump’s comments about Canada becoming America’s 51st state.
And while the data should be taken with a grain of salt, Trautman added that it seems Americans are still travelling to Canada.
“Another really important component of this is the value of the Canadian dollar,” she added.
“So anytime the value of the Canadian dollar is lower or sort of shifts, we do see a corresponding shift in cross-border travel. Obviously, for Americans, it becomes less expensive to travel to Canada, to go out to dinner, to go shopping, what have you. And for Canadians, it becomes more expensive to travel to the U.S. so that’s also an important factor, particularly here in our region, where so much of the cross-border travel is discretionary.”
Guy Occhiogrosso, president and CEO of the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce, told Global News they don’t have specific data to know if Trump’s tariffs threats are having a direct impact on cross-border shopping but anecdotally, it feels like it.
“If we listen to the number of Canadians that say ‘we’re not shopping in the U.S.’ or, ‘we’re stopping trips’ or any of the variations of, again, that political protest, it certainly would indicate that there has been and is and will be a decline,” Occhiogrosso said.
He added that they have seen fewer B.C. licence plates in Bellingham parking lots but he also pointed to the snowfall and the declining Canadian dollar as contributing factors.
“It’s going to be a weekend-to-weekend comparison,” Occhiogrosso said.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
