American tourism to Quebec may have dipped, but visitors are still coming — apologetically
Comeau is the front desk manager at Ripplecove Hôtel & Spa in the Eastern Townships. He said some Americans even call ahead to ask if being from the United States will be a problem.
But not everybody is worried.
"I feel welcome and I want to support Canada," Daisy Benson told Radio-Canada while having a drink with her partner outside the Hovey Manor in North Hatley, Que., in late May.
Border crossing data shows fewer Americans are coming to Canada, and some theorize tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump may be the problem: travellers may fear they won't be welcome north of the border.
The number of trips Americans took to Canada by car declined 10.7 per cent in April and 8.4 per cent in May compared to the same months last year.
Air travel was also down, with a 5.5 per cent drop in April and a slight 0.3 per cent decline in May, according to data from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).
Despite the dip compared to 2024, the number of American air travellers over the first three weeks of May remains nearly seven per cent higher than in 2023. Travel was at a near standstill in 2020 and 2021, and remained quite low in 2022.
Looking back to 2019, about five per cent more U.S. travellers arrived by air than this year.
Encouraging Americans to come visit
At least one tourism association, Tourisme Cantons-de-l'Est in the Eastern Townships, has launched an ad campaign to reassure their neighbours they'll be warmly welcomed.
It aims to dispel fears as the summer season gets underway. The ad is playing on YouTube and on TVs in northeastern United States.
The organization's head, Shanny Hallé, said the exchange rate "is very favourable for Americans right now, so they can experience luxury vacations inexpensively."
The campaign emphasizes affordability while "reaffirming our values of hospitality," she said, to help Americans feel welcome.
Between January and April, she said, entries at the Quebec-U.S. border fell by a little more than four per cent.
Montreal tourism expected to be around par
Yves Lalumière, president and CEO of Tourisme Montréal, said the slower start wasn't unexpected given recent tensions, but he expects American travel to remain around average — plus or minus three to five per cent.
"We're not looking at any decline that is drastic," Lalumière said, noting the Grand Prix is expected to bring in two million visitors.
It's not going to be a record year, he said, but it won't be a bad one either. He called it a stable positive and said there are no signs of a significant slowdown.
"We're still early in the game for the summer," he said. "August, September and October are good months for American clientele as well."
With fewer Canadians travelling to the U.S., he said Canadian organizations and businesses are planning conventions and meetings in Montreal instead. At the same time, the city is working to attract more international visitors.
The Montreal airport has continued diversifying its routes to reduce reliance on any one market. Lalumière said the city is now connected to 156 markets, with flights from places like India, Dubai and Tokyo.
"We've added a lot of flights. A lot of countries," said Lalumière.
Like Lalumière, Glenn Castanheira said there was a downturn in American travellers, but momentum is returning. He's the executive director of downtown Montreal's merchants' association, which grew concerned when the trade war began and Trump started threatening Canada's sovereignty.
While he remains cautiously optimistic, Castanheira said efforts by groups like his — along with the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, Tourisme Montréal and others — suggest Americans aren't particularly worried about crossing into Canada.
They know they're welcome, he said, but they're saying "sorry" so often that he jokes Americans may be becoming Canadian.
"Add to the mix that the American dollar is to the advantage of the Americans, that's a huge player," said Castanheira, who studied at Harvard University.
"What I am trying to say is, we're not that concerned because Americans know how welcome they are, especially here in Montreal."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
23 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Corporation for Public Broadcasting to shut down after being defunded by Congress, targeted by Trump
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a cornerstone of American culture for three generations, announced Friday it would take steps toward its own closure after being defunded by Congress — marking the end of a nearly six-decade era in which it fueled the production of renowned educational programming, cultural content and even emergency alerts. The demise of the corporation, known as CPB, is a direct result of President Donald Trump's targeting of public media, which he has repeatedly said is spreading political and cultural views antithetical to those the United States should be espousing. The closure is expected to have a profound impact on the journalistic and cultural landscape — in particular, public radio and TV stations in small communities across the United States. CPB helps fund both PBS and NPR, but most of its funding is distributed to more than 1,500 local public radio and television stations around the country. The corporation also has deep ties to much of the nation's most familiar programming, from NPR's 'All Things Considered' to, historically, 'Sesame Street,' 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood' and the documentaries of Ken Burns. The corporation said its end, 58 years after being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, would come in an 'orderly wind-down.' In a statement, it said the decision came after the passage through Congress of a package that clawed back its funding for the next two budget years — about $1.1 billion. Then, the Senate Appropriations Committee reinforced that policy change Thursday by excluding funding for the corporation for the first time in more than 50 years as part of a broader spending bill. 'Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,' said Patricia Harrison, the corporation's president and CEO. As part of Thursday's committee deliberations, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., authored but then withdrew an amendment to restore CPB funding for the coming budget year. She said she still believed there was a path forward 'to fix this before there are devastating consequences for public radio and television stations across the country.' 'It's hard to believe we've ended up in the situation we're in,' she said. 'And I'm going to continue to work with my colleagues to fix it.' But Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, sounded a less optimistic tone. 'I understand your concerns, but we all know we litigated this two weeks ago,' Capito said. 'Adopting this amendment would have been contrary to what we have already voted on.' CPB said it informed employees Friday that most staff positions will end with the fiscal year on Sept. 30. It said a small transition team will stay in place until January to finish any remaining work — including, it said, 'ensuring continuity for music rights and royalties that remain essential to the public media system.' 'Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,' Harrison said. 'We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.' The impact will be widespread NPR stations use millions of dollars in federal money to pay music licensing fees. Now, many will have to renegotiate these deals. That could impact, in particular, outlets that build their programming around music discovery. NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher estimated recently, for example, that some 96% of all classical music broadcast in the United States is on public radio stations. Federal money for public radio and television has traditionally been appropriated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes it to NPR and PBS. Roughly 70% of the money goes directly to the 330 PBS and 246 NPR stations across the country, although that's only a shorthand way to describe its potential impact. Trump, who has called the CPB a 'monstrosity,' has long said that public broadcasting displays an extreme liberal bias, helped create the momentum in recent months for an anti-public broadcasting groundswell among his supporters in Congress and around the country. It is part of a larger initiative in which he has targeted institutions — particularly cultural ones — that produce content or espouse attitudes that he considers 'un-American.' The CPB's demise represents a political victory for those efforts. His impact on the media landscape has been profound. He has also gone after U.S. government media that had independence charters, including the venerable Voice of America, ending that media outlet's operations after many decades. Trump also fired three members of the corporation's board of directors in April. In legal action at the time, the fired directors said their dismissal was governmental overreach targeting an entity whose charter guarantees it independence.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Who are the winners and losers of Trump's tariffs?
The penguins have been offered some relief. The people of Switzerland, Laos and Syria, not so much. This is the unlikely jumble of winners and losers of President Donald Trump's finalized list of tariffs, which governments, markets and businesses across the globe were scrambling to make sense of Friday. Some countries, such as Canada and South Africa, reacted with grave disappointment, warning that Trump's executive order could prompt job losses globally and rising costs for Americans. For others, the damage was not as bad as expected, with some able to thrash out deals before his deadline, and others hopeful of striking one in the future. The president had already drawn confusion and alarm when first unveiling his tariff list in April. Many analysts questioned, for example, why he was imposing a 10% levy on Heard and McDonald — two Antarctic outposts populated solely by penguins — or slapping a colossal 50% rate on the impoverished southern African nation of Lesotho. This week's finalized list elicited reprieve but also dismay— often with little or no explanation. The harshest import taxes were slapped on Syria (41%), Laos and Myanmar (40%), three relatively poor nations with, at best, modest trading relationships with Washington. And Iraq, Serbia (both 35%) and Algeria (30%) also found themselves subject to Trump's executive pen. (Brazil faces its own separate 50% tariff as punishment for what Trump says is a "witch hunt" against its former president and his right-wing ally, Jair Bolsonaro, who is accused of plotting a coup.) Elsewhere Thursday, Lesotho's 50% rate was slashed to 15% — but not before huge damage was already wrought. The initial tariff saw American buyers pausing orders, thousands of people losing their jobs and the government declaring a state of disaster. Meanwhile the Heard and McDonald Islands and its flightless bird inhabitants dodged the tariff Trump threatened to impose on Australia, which owns the islands, and remained at the 10% rate first announced in April. It is 'hard to tell if there is any logic' to deciphering why some countries have been hit so hard while others were spared, said David Henig, a trade expert at the European Center for International Political Economy, a think tank based in Brussels. Without a detailed explanation from the White House, Henig told NBC News, the calculations were most likely based on the previous formula Washington used that placed the biggest tariffs on the countries with the biggest trade surpluses. In announcing the tariffs Thursday, Trump said these surpluses 'constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States.' (Many economists disagree that the U.S. trade deficit is inherently a bad thing, and his tariffs are the subject of an ongoing legal fight that is likely to end up at the Supreme Court.) While the international uproar over Lesotho meant it was given a reprieve, other nations may have seen their tariffs maintained or even increased because 'they weren't the most obviously unfairly treated developing countries,' Henig said. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News on its rationale. It's not only developing or obscure places feeling the heat of Trump's taxes. Switzerland — one of the richest nations in terms of gross domestic product per capita — awoke Friday to find that it had been slapped with a colossal 39% rate, which its government noted with 'great regret.' This could spell trouble for Swiss chocolate and luxury watches, for which the U.S. is the largest market, with shares for Watches of Switzerland Group PLC tumbling 8.5% following the news Friday. India also caught the eye as an American ally hit with a large 25% tariff but dismissed any suggestion of a rift, with Goods Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal saying the world's most populous nation was 'confident that the relationship will continue to move forward.' In Southeast Asia, meanwhile, where exports to the U.S. have been increasing as manufacturers shift production from China, the reaction was generally relief. Thailand and Cambodia, which just agreed to a ceasefire after a five-day border conflict that killed more than 40 people, welcomed their 19% rate as 'win-win' and 'great news,' while Malaysia described its own rate as a 'positive outcome.' Cambodia had been threatened with 49%. The consistency creates a level playing field for Southeast Asian governments — with Indonesia and the Philippines on the same rate, and 20% for Vietnam — after they had worried Trump's tariffs might favor some countries over others. Taiwan, a tech hub that has a large trade surplus with the U.S., was hit with a 20% rate, lower than the 32% threatened in April but higher than the 15% negotiated by Japan, South Korea and the European Union. President Lai Ching-te said Friday that the 20% rate was 'temporary' and that his government expected to negotiate a lower number. Still up in the air are the final tariff rates between the U.S. and China, the world's two largest economies, who rattled global markets this spring as they imposed spiraling tit-for-tat levies before both sides agreed to put most on pause until Aug. 12. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said after meeting with Chinese trade officials this week that a potential extension of that pause could not be confirmed until Trump signed off on it. 'China's position on tariffs is consistent and clear,' Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a daily press briefing Friday. 'There are no winners in tariff wars or trade wars.' Alexander Smith reported from London and Jennifer Jett reported from Hong Kong. This article was originally published on Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump tariffs: What are the sticking points in the Canada-US trade negotiation
Prime Minister Mark Carney has remained tight lipped following U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement he would raise the tariff on Canada from 25 per cent to 35 per cent. His policy, while Canada-U.S. trade talks are ongoing, is not to negotiate in public. Mercedes Stephenson breaks down the major sticking points that could be slowing down the negotiations.
