Canadians are driving back to the U.S. They still aren’t flying

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security officer hands back a passport to a Canadian traveller at the Peace Arch Border Crossing n British Columbia. Photo by SAM LEUNG /PROVINCE

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Trips to the United States by Canadian residents rose for a fourth straight month in July, but the entire increase came by car, according to new federal data.

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Statistics Canada counted 2.3 million return trips from the United States last month, up 10.2 per cent from the same month in 2025, in preliminary figures released Tuesday. It was the fourth consecutive month of year-over-year growth. Automobile trips rose 12.8 per cent while air trips fell 1.4 per cent.

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The agency attributed the increase largely to a base-year effect, because Canadian travel to the United States fell sharply in 2025. Measured against July 2024, before the pullback, car trips were down 28.9 per cent and air trips down 26.8 per cent. Statistics Canada said in an email that comparing a month with 2024 “helps illustrate the trend relative to the period before the trade-related conflict.” The counts show Canadians made 1.1 million fewer trips to the United States in July 2025 than in July 2024. About 210,000 of those have come back.

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Wayne Smith, director of the Institute for Hospitality and Tourism Research at Toronto Metropolitan University, said in an email the four-month run amounts to “a stabilization and return to a new normal,” at least for the foreseeable future.

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Smith wrote that the trips coming back are most likely visits to friends and relatives, short excursions and business travel, while “longer vacations are still down.” The figures count border crossings rather than travellers and do not record why a trip was taken. Statistics Canada wrote that there have been no changes in the way it counts over that period. Complete counts for July are due Sept. 22.

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Statistics Canada publishes the trip-length breakdown only in its daily tables. Totalled across July, Canadians made 1,093,132 same-day trips to the United States and 1,183,922 overnight trips. Same-day travel rose 13.2 per cent from last July and overnight travel 7.5 per cent, so three-fifths of the month’s increase was trips that ended the same day. Overnight trips remain 30.3 per cent below their July 2024 level, against 26.5 per cent for same-day.

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A separate Statistics Canada study released July 22 measured that split for last year. Visits to see friends and relatives in the United States fell nine per cent in 2025 (536,000 visits), while leisure visits fell 21.5 per cent (3.2 million). Family travel was “less prone to destination substitution,” the study found.

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Air travel went the other way. The agency recorded 378,482 return flights from the United States in July, down from 383,703 a year earlier and 517,256 in July 2024. Air travel has not recovered any of what it lost.

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Canadians kept flying, just not south. Return flights from overseas totalled 988,884 in July, above the 947,347 recorded in July 2024, while flights from the United States fell more than a quarter over the same two years.