The cake sitting on Aimee Loughran’s counter tells two stories at once. One is about celebration, a state trooper’s retirement marked with buttercream and fondant. The other is about survival, a small bakery owner in Lewiston, New York, trying to fill the gap left by customers who simply stopped coming. Those customers are Canadian, and their absence is reshaping the economics of border towns across upstate New York.
Loughran’s Just Desserts shop sits twenty minutes north of Niagara Falls. The street outside her door used to hum with weekend traffic from Ontario. Now it’s quieter. Revenues at her bakery have fallen by thirty percent. She’s a single mother, so the math is unforgiving. Every dollar lost at the counter means choices at home get harder.
Down the block, Judy watches the clock at Antique to Chic. She’s seventy-three, a former teacher who co-owns the shop with eight others. Sales dropped twenty percent last year. The decline isn’t abstract to her. It’s personal, and it’s made her question things she never thought she’d question. She told reporters she’s angry that Canadians don’t want to visit anymore, but in the same breath, she said she doesn’t blame them.
What’s happening in Lewiston is happening along the entire Niagara corridor. The boycott isn’t organized or official, but it’s real. Canadians have pulled back from cross-border trips in numbers that alarm business owners and elected officials alike. The reasons aren’t subtle. Donald Trump’s tariffs, his annexation rhetoric, and fears about immigration enforcement have combined into a deterrent stronger than any border checkpoint.
John Percy runs Destination Niagara, the regional tourism agency. He’s made a decision that would have been unthinkable two years ago: stop advertising to Canadians entirely. The budget is too tight, and the political climate too hostile, to keep chasing a market that’s decided to stay home. Instead, the agency is pivoting to Americans in other states, hoping to replace one customer base with another.
The shift is painful because Canadian visitors weren’t just occasional tourists. They were regulars. Favorable exchange rates and lower sales taxes meant families from Ontario crossed the border for milk, bread, and gas. They shopped at outlet malls, stayed in hotels, ate at diners. Percy remembers the 1990s when Canadians would change clothes in parking lots, discarding old outfits in donation bins and driving home in new purchases with tags pulled off.
Frank Strangio owns hotels in Niagara Falls. He’s president of the local hotel and motel association, so he sees the numbers across the industry. The Fashion Outlets mall used to be packed with Ontario license plates. Now the parking lot looks different. Some stores have closed. Strangio worries about a cascading effect if the mall shuts down, taking tax revenue with it. He’s already hiring fewer staff during the off-season because occupancy rates have dropped.
The data backs up what business owners are seeing. New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s office reported a twenty-one percent drop in Canadians entering the state in 2025. That’s more than three million fewer visits than the year before. In the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area alone, personal vehicle crossings fell by 16.3 percent, a decline of over 717,000 trips, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics figures.
A recent poll by the Globe and Mail found that only nine percent of Canadians view the US as a trustworthy ally. Fifty-one percent of respondents said they had canceled American trips in reaction to Trump’s comments. Percy said he’s never seen patriotism mobilize so quickly in the Canadian market. He added that if the roles were reversed, Americans would likely react the same way, or worse.
Some Canadians still cross the border, but they do it quietly. Percy said visitors tell him they won’t mention the trip to neighbors or family. They hide it. That’s a cultural shift with economic consequences, because word-of-mouth and social media used to drive cross-border traffic. Now the incentive runs the other way.
Robert Restaino is the mayor of Niagara Falls. He has family and friends in Canada. Every time Trump made disparaging comments about the country, Restaino said he winced. Hearing Canada described as a potential fifty-first state, or Wayne Gretzky suggested as governor, felt pointless and damaging. He understands arguments about NATO burden-sharing, but the personal jabs accomplished nothing except poisoning relationships.
The tariff war added economic injury to rhetorical insult. Senator Chuck Schumer visited Niagara Falls last summer and called the trade policies a dagger aimed at upstate New York. He described tariffs as a tax on working families, warning that every western New Yorker would feel the cost.
Restaino is trying to plan around the problem. The city is investing two hundred million dollars in a 6,000-seat events center. The hope is that sports can sustain tourism even when politics create friction. He’s banking on minor league games, college tournaments, and youth competitions in hockey, basketball, volleyball, and lacrosse. Sports, he reasons, have a way of transcending national tensions. He pointed to the Olympics, where countries that don’t like each other still compete.
Whether Canadian sports fans will come remains uncertain. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of Buffalo Bills season ticket holders are Canadian, according to the team. But Strangio has noticed fewer overnight stays from Canadian fans on game weekends. Families used to make a trip out of it, visiting the Falls and staying in local hotels. That’s happening less often now.
The long-term effects worry Percy. Every percentage point of market share lost to international visitors takes years to regain. Tourism dollars fund police, fire departments, road maintenance, and sidewalks. It’s the top industry in Niagara County and the second-largest in New York State. When that revenue drops, public services feel it.
Restaino doesn’t see a quick fix under the current administration. He said the federal government would need to humbly recognize its missteps, and he’s not sure that’s possible in the current dynamic. The political will doesn’t seem to be there, so border communities are left to adapt on their own.
A plaque at Lewiston’s Peace Park commemorates the longstanding friendship between Canada and the United States. It describes the unfortified boundary as a lesson in peace for all nations. The language feels almost quaint now, given the strain in the relationship.
Kathleen Stefik is fifty-nine and voted for Trump. She personally feels the hostility from Canadians and has curtailed her own trips across the border in response. She agrees with some of his policies, especially on immigration, but she thinks his rhetoric about Canada has been damaging. She put it bluntly: he should stop talking and act like a president.
The economic pain in places like Lewiston and Niagara Falls isn’t about partisan politics. It’s about livelihoods. Small business owners didn’t set tariff policy or make annexation jokes, but they’re absorbing the financial consequences. The boycott is a form of consumer protest, and it’s proving effective. Canadians are voting with their wallets, and border towns are counting the cost.
