Canadians took close to 10 million fewer trips to the United States in 2025 than in 2024—a drop of 25%. Comprising most of this drop were 8.4 million fewer trips to the United States by land and 1.2 million fewer trips by air—or declines of 30% and 12%, respectively. These are the largest year-over-year percentage decreases outside those of the COVID‑19 pandemic, when cross-border travel was essentially closed.

Canadians have instead been travelling within Canada and to international destinations other than the United States. Data from Statistics Canada show that Canadians took 4% more trips domestically and spent about 10% more in Canada on travel and tourism between the first and third quarters of 2025 than in the same period in 2024. Notably, domestic trips and expenditures surged in the second quarter of 2025—with year-over-year increases of 11% and 15%, respectively—as the Buy Canadian movement gained momentum.

Consumers are buying Canadian at the grocery store

Although measuring changes in travel habits is relatively straightforward, assessing whether consumers have shifted their preferences toward Canadian products is more difficult. Most of what we know comes from consumers’ self-reported behaviour or statements from retailers rather than actual spending data, which are more difficult to find.

To address this gap, we use detailed transaction-level data from the NielsenIQ Homescan Consumer Panel. Each month, about 10,000 Canadian households in the panel record their purchases by scanning the barcodes of their purchased items, typically after returning from the store. Food makes up three-quarters of all spending in this dataset.

We take the barcodes in the dataset and link them to a database maintained by GS1, the official global registry for product codes. The GS1 data show the country where the product was licensed, not necessarily where the product was made. Recognizing this limitation, we use the licensing country as a practical (though imperfect) way to infer each product’s origin. We then classify products into three groups based on country: Canada, the United States and other.

Our results show that households have indeed shifted their food spending away from US products and toward Canadian ones. The shift is modest but clearly visible. In March 2025—as trade tensions escalated—the proportion of food spending on Canadian products went up by approximately 2 percentage points relative to January 2025, while the proportion spent on US products fell by a similar amount (Chart 2). And what started in March wasn’t short-lived—it persisted through the summer.