Whether it’s because of the continuous threats from U.S. President Donald Trump to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian imports or his proposal to make Canada the 51st American state, Brockville, Ont. resident Larry McMullen is taking a stand.
“We’re not being appreciated by the Americans,” he says.
McMullen and his wife visited Florida last year, but they won’t be doing the same in 2025.
“We really don’t want to spend our money there at the moment,” he explains.
It is a growing trend among Canadians who are upset by Trump’s comments about their country, forcing American tourism agencies to prepare for the possibility of losing some business.
But the issue is a bit more complicated for 1,000 Islands Tourism, given they represent both Canadian and American locations.
“We really treat our destination and our home as a binational one,” says Corey Fram, the director of the 1,000 Islands International Tourism Council. “We’re intertwined so much culturally, socially, economically.”
One Thousand Islands Tourism’s jurisdiction includes seven communities in northern New York, and the proximity to Ontario results in a significant portion of their revenue coming from Canadians.
“Around 15 to 16 per cent of our total spending comes from Canadians,” Fram explains to CTV News Ottawa during a virtual interview from his office in Alexandria Bay, NY.
“When we look at the border crossings in northern New York state, in a year, we probably get a little more than two million Canadians traveling across that border.”
According to statistics from the U.S. Travel Association, Canadians generated $20.5 billion in revenue by travelling to the United States in 2024, and New York State is one of the top five most visited states by Canadians.
They project Canadian travel to dip by 10 per cent in 2025.
“To cut that back by something as high as 10 per cent is very concerning,” Fram says.
The agency is also concerned about maintaining their binational approach as an organization. They market the 1,000 Islands as a shared region rather than two different countries.
“To know that that could be jeopardized because folks maybe don’t want to cross or aren’t comfortable crossing, that’s going to be a hard problem and hard thing for us to have to figure out here in the year to come,” Fram explains.
“It’s just tough for us right now. It doesn’t really align with what our value system is here in a binational kind of a place like the 1,000 Islands.”
