Stephanie Riccio brought her children to New York City when they were newborns.
“This is a special place for us and a tradition for our daughter,” says the Toronto-based CPA. To celebrate their daughter’s birthday every April, they travel to the city to watch a Yankees game at Yankee Stadium.
But this year, they kept quiet about it while traveling.
“I felt like this wasn’t something I wanted to broadcast because I felt like I shouldn’t be spending money on it,” she says. “There’s the struggle of being a very proud Canadian, but these are also our traditions and memories, and they mean something to my daughter, and she didn’t want to give them up.”
Riccio points to Canadian reluctance to travel to the United States, now a grassroots national resistance. In parallel with the Buy Canada movement, which began when U.S. President Donald Trump first began imposing tariffs in March 2025 and continues to this day, Canadians also changed their travel plans.
In 2024, Canadians made 39 million round-trip trips across the U.S.-Canada border. Then tariffs and mention of the 51st state began, and the number sharply decreased. Canadian travelers to the U.S. decreased year-over-year for 15 consecutive months through April 2026. According to Environics Research’s 2026 Canada Travel and Tourism Outlook Survey, six in 10 Canadians are actively avoiding traveling to the United States (46%) or are planning to travel to the United States but are reluctant to do so (15%).
But while there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of Canadians crossing the border this summer, the number is still 25.6 per cent lower than during the same period in 2024, according to Statistics Canada. Like Riccio, they travel to sports games, concerts and theme parks. However, many of them don’t post their trips on social media or talk about their vacations with friends. Because the “elbows up” sentiment is still prevalent.
“If I had to tell someone I was going, I would feel a little nervous. Are they judging me? They’d say, ‘I wish I was here in Toronto watching the Yankees,'” she says.
Kemi Wells-Conrad, founder and president of Vancouver travel agency Wells Luxury Travel, says travelers fall into two categories.
Recent tensions between the two countries have led some of her clients to restrict travel to the U.S. altogether, canceling planned U.S. trips or avoiding connections at U.S. airports.
Others, especially those traveling with family, “are still traveling,” she said.
“Because Hawaii, for example, is very good at family resorts, and it may be an annual tradition, and some people have homes in Arizona or one of the Hawaiian Islands.
“There were definitely people who were like, ‘Oh, I didn’t tell my friends I was going,’ or ‘I didn’t post on social media that I was going,'” Wells-Conrad says.
But they especially tend to isolate Hawaii from the rest of the United States, she explains. “Of course, this is part of the United States, but different cultures have different perspectives on people.”
Barry Choi, a personal finance and loyalty program expert from Toronto, travels to the United States for both work and play. Although he remained silent about the trip at the beginning of tensions between Canada and the United States, he has now shared both of them on his Instagram account with more than 12,000 followers, which has prompted backlash.
“The reality is, I’m not going to the United States to visit Donald Trump. I’m going to see friends and family and things that we don’t have here in Canada. If there was something like Disney World in Vaughan,” he said, referring to the Toronto suburbs, “of course I wouldn’t go to Orlando. Or if my friends and family lived here in Canada instead of in Miami, California or New York, there would be no reason to go.”
He decided to start posting these trips publicly because he thought it was worth sharing what this trip was like for Canadians with those who follow his social media accounts.
“I was in Palm Beach, and as soon as I told them I was from Canada, every local I talked to apologized for the president,” Choi said. “They said, ‘I didn’t vote for him. Most people here don’t like him. I thought that was a little shocking, to be honest.’
Tariffs and tensions are impacting people on both sides of the border, he says. “I feel like the local people are feeling the same pain as us.”
Still, some who ventured across the border decided it wasn’t worth it.
Kayley, a Toronto marketing executive who did not want her last name published for fear of backlash, recently drove across the border to see a Hayley Williams concert in upstate New York, but has remained quiet about her trip.
“I know my family is very against it, and my friends are worried,” she says of her trip to the United States.
She was considering reselling the tickets instead of going at all.
“All the rhetoric about Lake Ontario happened about a week before the concert, and then the tariffs came in, so there was a growing sense that everything was happening,” she says. He had planned to cross by car with friends, but they wondered if the border would become stricter from now on.
Eventually, she and a friend drove to the show. Normally, she would post about her road trips and concerts on social media, but she didn’t post at all during the trip. Partly because she didn’t want people following her to know she had left, but another reason was fear that her phone would be checked at the border.
Her cell phone was not searched upon entering the United States, but her car was.
“We used to go to upstate New York a lot as a family when we were kids, but[this time]it felt completely different. They searched every car with flashlights, no matter what,” she says. “The atmosphere has completely changed. The type of surveillance has completely changed.”
As a result, she has no intention of making another trip, whether she keeps quiet about it or not.
