The story was supposed to be about tourism, with Canadians not booking hotels in Florida and empty buses at Niagara Falls.
But researchers tracking cell phones say business travel is collapsing along with the vacations, and the hit is much bigger than border numbers suggested.
University of Toronto researchers Karen Chapple, Yihoi Jung, and Jeff Allen pulled phone movement data across 267 U.S. cities to measure the real drop in Canadian visits since President Trump's trade war started.
The number they got: a 42% year-over-year decline in Canadian visits to U.S. cities, while earlier estimates based only on border data put the drop at 25%.
Out of 267 cities studied, only three saw more Canadian visitors than the year before.
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The top cities for Canadian decline include some obvious ones, like Las Vegas, Orlando, and border tourist spots.
But the list also includes New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston, none of which are exactly vacation hubs.
Chapple said the team thinks the drop in those cities reflects fewer tech and finance workers flying in for business meetings. As she put it, the typical flight to San Francisco isn't full of tourists - it's full of professionals heading to client offices.
Mid-sized cities are also taking a hit, with Grand Rapids, Michigan posting the second-biggest drop in the study, since the city has deep ties to Ontario's auto industry and tariff uncertainty has frozen a lot of cross-border travel.
Canadian travelers spend billions of dollars in the U.S. each year, with most of that money landing in hotels, restaurants, retail, and ground transport.
The University of Toronto data suggests the hit is broader, since tech vendors, banks, and auto suppliers all depend on the same cross-border meetings that aren't happening at the same rate anymore.
After three years for travel to recover from COVID, this dip is starting from a much weaker base.
There's no recovery signal yet, since the trade dispute is still active and Canadian travelers aren't rebooking the trips they canceled.
Researchers don't know how long this lasts, but they know it's bigger than anyone thought.
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