A new survey reveals that 74 per cent of Canadians are likely to stop traveling to the United States in response to a de facto trade war between launched by U.S. President Donald Trump in the form of trade tariffs and his disdain for NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement.).This and other results of the survey conducted by Nanos Research and commissioned by Canada’s CTV News and The Globe and Mail, came out last week, just as the 2018 peak summer travel season was in full throttle.
Numbers differ when broken down across the country:
—More than 82 per cent of the residents of Quebec say they’ll likely reduce their travel to the United States.
—In the Prairies (the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta), 58 per cent may change their plans, while 37 per cent are not likely to change their plans.
—What real-time data there are sparse. Before the talk of a trade war developed, Destination Canada reported that Canadian travel to the U.S. was actually up 5.7 percent for the first four months of 2018—to 1.9 million vs. an estimated 18.5 million in 2017. And according to a more recent report from Statistics Canada, Canadian travel to the United States has risen in the first half of 2018, and is now 8.7 per cent higher than it was a year ago. (The first-half increase was a welcome development to tour and travel industry officials in the United States, as preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) indicated that the total had crept back up to 20.3 million last year after falling from 23 million in 1914 to 19.3 million in 2016.)
The results came from a Nanos omnibus survey of 1,000 Canadians, taken between June 26 and 28, 2018. Participants were recruited by phone and administered an online survey. The margin of error for a random survey of 1,000 Canadians is +/- 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
