Canada thinks we're a bunch of hosers, eh?

Dislike of Trump is spilling over into broader public sentiment against the United States. Especially on our northern border.

Flags of Remembrance in Windsor, Ontario, in front of the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit. Windsor Star.

Today, Canadians will head to the polls to decide how to form their next government. Throughout 2023 and 2024, polling suggested the country’s next federal election would be a rout for the Conservative Party. Justin Trudeau — Canada’s previous prime minister and a member of the Liberal Party — was deeply unpopular, and it looked like Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre would have no trouble replacing him.

Something changed in 2025. In early January, support for the Conservative party peaked at 44 percent in The Economist’s polling average. The Liberals were down to only 20 percent. But as of today, the Liberals have skyrocketed to 43 percent support and the Conservatives trail at 39 percent. So, Polymarket odds now give Liberal leader Mark Carney — Trudeau’s replacement and the current Prime Minister of Canada — a 78 percent chance of retaining the job.

Why the sudden shift? Well, it’s generally bad practice to make definitive causal claims about data like this. But we can make an exception here: the “something” that changed is Trump retaking office. We’ve written before about Donald Trump bullying Canada with tariff policy. He’s also increasingly interested in making Canada the 51st state. (A move that, incidentally, would pretty clearly harm the Republican Party.)

Your mileage may vary on just how serious Trump is about the “51st state” business. The Canadian public is done playing around, though. They’re not just booing the Star Spangled Banner at hockey games. Even back in January, about 8 in 10 Canadians opposed Canada becoming part of the U.S, and a March Leger poll found that 41 percent of Canadians see “Tariffs / Trump / US aggression” as the top issue facing Canada. In a more recent YouGov poll, 64 percent of Canadians saw the U.S. as “unfriendly” or an “enemy,” and a majority (61 percent) said they’ve started boycotting American companies.

Canada’s Liberal Party is taking Trump seriously, too — and that’s part of why they’re favored today. When Carney called today’s snap election back in March, he said “We are facing the most significant crisis of our lifetimes because of President Trump’s unjustified trade actions and his threats to our sovereignty.” Meanwhile, the Conservative Party’s previously popular message that “Canada is broken” has fallen flat amid the recent upswell in Canadian patriotism.

It’s not just polls. Canadians are voting with their feet.

When reports began surfacing about Canadian tourists canceling their plans to visit the United States, we were a bit skeptical. They seemed like the cross-border, Opposite Day equivalent of liberals’ mostly idle threats to flee to Canada if Trump won. In March 2017, during Trump’s first term, 3.4 million people entered the U.S. from the northern border by passenger vehicle, essentially unchanged from the 3.5 million who entered under Barack Obama in March 2016.

This time around, though, visits from our northern neighbors have fallen off a cliff.

The number of people crossing into the U.S. from Canada has been in long-term decline. And it fell to nearly zero during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the border was closed to non-essential travel for more than a year. It had shown signs of recovery, though. Between October 2024 and January 2025, border crossings increased between 6 and 10 percent each month as compared to the same month a year earlier, according to data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). (This year-over-year comparison is necessary because travel from Canada is highly seasonal; it’s cold up there in the winter, eh?) But then in February 2025 — Trump’s first full month in office, and after he implemented and then suspended tariffs — it fell by 17 percent versus February 2024. March was even worse, with a 26 percent drop as compared to a year previous.

Travel data provider OAG reports an even larger decrease — 70 percent! — for advanced bookings on flights to the U.S. originating from Canada for the summer travel season. And indeed, that 26 percent figure from BTS may understate the magnitude of the decline. The BTS data counts all passengers crossing into the U.S. from the north, including Americans returning home, not distinguishing between Yankees and Canucks. So we asked ChatGPT’s Deep Research to scan the web and analyze population density data to estimate the share of border crossings in each state that are from Canadian residents:

The only state where the majority of northern border crossings are made by Americans is Alaska, Deep Research estimates, owing to the incredibly low population densities in the Yukon and Northern British Columbia. And there, the decline in border traffic was only 10 percent. By comparison, Deep Research estimates that 80 percent of border crossings in North Dakota are by Canadians. (Winnipeg is only about 60 miles from the North Dakota border.) There, traffic fell by 32 percent.

In fact, there’s a nearly perfect correlation between the Canadian share of passengers and the decline in visits. There are already a lot of charts in this article, so we’re going to skip publishing this one, but if you draw a regression line, it implies that visits originating in Canada have fallen by 40 percent, whereas the change in U.S. passengers visiting Canada and then returning home is negligible.¹

The rest of the world is starting to hate us, too

Zooming out from Canada, Europe, Mexico and even Greenland don’t like what they’re seeing out of the Trump White House. Trump is seen as a necessary partner, perhaps, but not an ally.

Based on one recent poll of nine EU countries, about half of Europeans think Trump is an “enemy of Europe.” And a March YouGov poll of five Western European countries (Italy, Britain, France, Germany, and Spain) found that between 58 and 78 percent of Europeans see Trump as a threat to peace and security in Europe. These numbers aren’t much better than those for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Does any of this translate into how people view America in general — and not just our president? Generally, views of the U.S. tend to be more stable than views of the U.S. president.² But already, there’s some evidence that Europeans’ attitudes toward Trump are changing how they view the rest of us.

In the YouGov / Eurotrack Survey, favorability toward the U.S. during Joe Biden’s presidency hovered around 50 to 60 percent across seven European countries. Those numbers dropped quickly after Trump retook office and are now below the 50 percent mark in each of these countries. For example, U.S. favorability in Britain fell from around 50 in 2023 to 37 percent in February 2025. The shift in Denmark — of which Greenland is an autonomous territory — was even more extreme: 60 percent to 20 percent.

True, all this data is from polls, and attitudes can be squishy. It’s pretty much costless for people in Europe and Canada to tell pollsters that they don’t like us. But just like for Canada, there’s plenty of non-polling evidence to support this, too. Year-on-year, overseas travel to the U.S. from Western Europe fell by 17 percent in March. It fell by 10 percent from South America, 24 percent from Central America, and 8 percent from Oceania. The only regions where travel to the U.S. is up year-on-year are Eastern Europe (+2 percent) and the Middle East (+18 percent).

Why this matters

In some ways, this change in travel behavior isn’t surprising. A number of foreign visitors to the U.S. — and even American citizens — have been detained or deported at the U.S. border amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Recently, the EU even began issuing burner phones to their staff headed to the U.S. over espionage concerns.

But if we traveled back in time to before Trump’s inauguration, we don’t think many observers would have predicted a decrease in travel to the U.S. of this magnitude happening so quickly and uniformly. Especially because we didn’t see the same sort of change during Trump’s first term. A term that also featured sweeping changes to immigration policy that happened early on. (For example, Trump’s travel ban on a number of predominantly Muslim countries just a week into his first term.)

People simply didn’t react to those policies by changing their travel habits. But this time they have:

This reduction in foreign travel is likely to have an economic impact. In February, the U.S. Travel Association (USTA) projected that a 10 percent decrease in Canadian inbound tourism would translate to $2.1 billion in lost spending and a potential 140,000 jobs lost. But if the decrease is closer to March’s approximately 30 percent decline in border crossings, that would map to more than $6 billion in losses in 2025. And remember, that’s just travel from Canada. It doesn’t include boycotts of American products sold in Canada or travel from other parts of the world.

And beyond the immediate economic impacts, there are long-term downsides to having most other countries dislike us. Trump’s Liberation Day Tariffs have already strained our global alliances. And if America continues to treat allies like adversaries, countries like China may step into the picture and fill the void left by the U.S.

If nothing else, if even famously affable Canadians have had just about enough of us to the point where it upends their entire election, this is a stark reminder that something has changed. We’re not just getting a replay of Trump 1.0, as some of his backers had hoped. America is isolating itself from the rest of the world in a way it hasn’t since almost a century ago.

1. How to reconcile that with the 70 percent decline in the OAG data? Well, for one thing, OAG is looking at air travel bookings several months in advance, and the numbers are getting worse. Also, most air travel booked well in advance is discretionary, i.e. for vacation rather than work and family emergencies.

2. For example, in the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey, German confidence in the U.S president peaked at 93 percent in 2009. It hit a low of 10 percent in 2018 and 2020. In that same period, German favorability toward the U.S. ranged between 26 percent (in 2020) and 64 percent (in 2009).