Evidence is mounting that Canadians are taking U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war seriously and avoiding travelling south of the border.
Airline executives are adding options for more domestic travel as they pivot away from flying as frequently or as extensively to U.S. destinations.
Data from different organizations show car crossings into the Washington state from 小蓝视频 are down, and that Canadians are making fewer future air-travel bookings to the U.S.
There are even calls for federal political leaders to promise to investigate how Canada’s aviation sector operates. That could lead to a change in how airports pay rents and possibly result in subsidies to airlines to fly unprofitable routes to smaller Canadian centres, as one way to further build a feeling of national connectedness.
Inter-city bus service is important to nation-building as well, advocates say.
Airlines pivot toward away from U.S., toward more domestic flights
Major Canadian airlines are making small shifts away from flying to the U.S. and are providing more routes within Canada and to other countries.
Air Canada’s, for example, launched inaugural flights between Vancouver International Airport (YVR) and Manila on April 1, and its executives spoke about reducing U.S. flights during a call with analysts in February.
BIV asked Air Canada this month for an update and spokeswoman Angela Mah responded that her airline’s non-stop Vancouver route to Washington D.C. no longer exists. Instead that route has been “modified” so it can be done via a stop in Toronto, she said.
“We are proactively acting in specific markets like certain U.S. leisure destinations, such as Florida, Vegas and Arizona,” Air Canada’s executive vice-president of revenue and network planning, Mark Galardo, told analysts in February.
“We are reducing our capacity exposure to these markets from March onward.”
Part of his airline’s expected volume increase in the April-through-June quarter is because Easter is in April this year, whereas it was in March last year, Galardo added.
“In the domestic Canadian market for late Q1, early Q2, we see a substantial market-capacity increase, which is maybe above what the market can absorb short term,” he said.
Flair Airlines, meanwhile, has similarly been cutting U.S. routes, upping domestic flight frequencies and extending seasonal domestic routes to operate year-round.
It axed its Vancouver-Palm Springs route from its summer schedule and has pivoted those planes to operate on its growing Canadian route network.
Flair flights between Kelowna and Calgary, for example, have been extended to be year-round from being seasonal.
Flight-frequency increases on Canadian routes are widespread.
This July, for example, Flair flights out of YVR are expected to increase:
73 per cent , to 24, to Toronto;
58 per cent, to 33, to Edmonton; and
55 per cent, to 24, to Edmonton.
Flair’s frequency between Vancouver and Guadalajara, Mexico, are set to double this July, compared with July 2023, to four.
The airline is also increasing domestic flights out of Abbotsford International Airport.
Low demand prompted WestJet to suspend service between Kelowna and Seattle in April, although at press time the airline was intending to restart that route in May.
WestJet shortened its season to stop flying between Kelowna to Las Vegas on March 30. It suspended its route this summer between Edmonton and Orlando and cancelled planned seasonal service between Calgary and New York’s LaGuardia Airport, attributing the moves to reduced demand.
It then added new routes, such between Halifax and Amsterdam, and between Calgary and Mexico City.
“WestJet has increased frequency between Vancouver and Cancun for Summer 2025,” WestJet spokesman Josh Yeats told BIV in an email.
“We are seeing increased demand for sun destinations across Mexico, the Caribbean and to Europe.”
Data shows Canadians intend to travel less to the U.S.
Trump’s bombast and mockery of Canada, calling it the 51st state, fueled a resurgence in Canadian nationalism and started to deter Canadian tourists from U.S. visits.
“Canadians are changing their travel plans to the US.,” Destination Canada CEO Marsha Walden told BIV. “There’s no question.”
Indeed, the website CascadeGatewayData.com found data from Washington state’s Department of Transportation and 小蓝视频 Ministry of Transportation showed a steep drop in the number of vehicles with 小蓝视频 licence plates entering Washington state in March: to 121,000 vehicles, down about 44 per cent from 216,000 vehicles in March 2024.
Statistics Canada researchers similarly found less cross-border travel between Canada and the U.S. in early 2025.
Their data show a 13.1-per-cent drop, to 585,700 trips by returning Canadian residents from the U.S. by air in February. Returning Canadians’ trips by automobile from the U.S. fell 23 per cent to 1.2 million in February, the nation’s number cruncher added.
Data published by the travel data company OAG in March said forward bookings between Canada and the U.S. in April were down 75.7 per cent.
The forward bookings in March by Canadians to the U.S. then fell 72.2 per cent for May, 71.6 per cent in June and 71.4 per cent for July.
“Cities and provinces are very much focused on domestic travel, and they’re really doubling down on making sure that people understand what they can do in their own province,” Walden said.
Feds need to look into Canadian aviation system
Inextricably linked with Canadians demand for more domestic flights is the country’s domestic aviation system.
One tourism advocate, Tourism Industry Association of 小蓝视频 CEO Walt Judas, told BIV that he would like to see the next Canadian government subsidize domestic airlines so the carriers can provide what would otherwise be unprofitable service between smaller Canadian centres.
“We have no specific comment on this, Mah said on behalf of Air Canada.
“Air Canada works with regional communities and our schedules are based on commercial demand and aircraft availability.”
She said her airline partners with regional carriers to connect traffic on select routes. Air Canada, Mah added, is the only airline to serve every province every day of the year.
Judas suggested that federal money also be provided to bus-service providers to travel between regional cities. Those routes have become scarce since Greyhound Canada stopped operating in 2021, he said.
小蓝视频 Transit spokesman Jamie Weiss told BIV his organization has intercity routes between various 小蓝视频 centres and that it gets “significant” federal funding for capital projects. It does not get federal dollars for operations, nor has 小蓝视频 Transit asked for that operational funding.
Instead it gets money from “multiple local government partners [and] funding from the province” for operations.
Judas said he wants Ottawa to conduct a larger “deep dive” into how the country’s aviation system operates.
High airport rents hurt the sector, he said.
Ottawa collects the rents but does not reinject that money back into airports, which often badly need infrastructure upgrades, or to Nav Canada to increase its number of air traffic controllers, Judas added.
