In the midst of plummeting Canadian travel to the U.S., North Country businesses are closely watching this weekend as a predictor of whether political tensions will impact their upcoming tourism season.

Butch Ladd, executive director of the North Country Chamber of Commerce, which serves Coös County and northeastern Vermont, said he’s keeping an eye out for Canadian license plates as New Hampshire’s neighbors to the north take their first long weekend of the summer for Victoria Day on May 19.

“That kind of signals the start of our summers, when they start coming through,” Ladd said.

This weekend will be the first big test to see whether Canadians are less keen on New Hampshire this year.

“When you get that holiday, they travel. They really do,” Ladd said. “They celebrate their holidays, and they do it by coming here. They love coming to the United States and vacationing and spending money, and obviously, for us, that’s a big to-do.”

In March, nearly 900,000 fewer Canadians traveled to the U.S. than in the same month in 2024. The decline came over the past several months as President Donald Trump placed tariffs on Canadian exports to the U.S. and has expressed a desire to make Canada the 51st state.

Anti-American sentiments are brewing north of the border, as voters delivered a resounding win to new Prime Minister Mark Carney, who campaigned on standing up to Trump. Whether that translates into fewer visits and tourism dollars spent in New Hampshire remains to be seen.

New Hampshire’s northernmost points are typically “more of a drive-through,” Ladd said, especially early on in the summer as Canadians venture down to Maine and New Hampshire coastline to open up their vacation homes for the season. 

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Anecdotally, he said he’s heard from a business or two that they’ve noticed slightly fewer Canadian license plates passing through than usual.

Shawn Cote, on the other hand, owns a convenience and outlet store in Errol and doesn’t anticipate any significant changes. His business, L.L. Cote, has a gas station and convenience items, as well as sporting equipment like guns and fishing gear.

“We’re the main throughways for a lot of Canadians, and they’re still going to go down there and go to the ocean,” Cote said. “It’s a day trip or a weekend trip, and it’s not that expensive.”

Plus, he added, most of his customers are conservative. For the estimated 5-10% of his clients who are Canadian, he doesn’t expect Trump’s tariffs or policies to deter them.

“The liberal Canadians, yes, we’re going to see a drawback on them,” Cote said. “But anybody that’s on the fence or conservative … they understand why Trump was doing what he was doing.”

Even if there is a drop in Canadian tourists to New England this year, Cote’s not worried. Ever since the border temporarily shut down during Covid, they haven’t been “enough of a driving force” to make or break his business revenue.

He ventured that businesses more to the south or on the coast, which tend to be Canadians’ end destination, will see starker impacts. But destinations in neighboring states are already seeing less Canadian interest, according to Vermont Public Radio. At Jay Peak, for example, early sales for next year’s winter passes were down 80% among Canadian visitors as of last month.

Similarly to Cote, however, Tom Caron said Canadians only make up a handful of his clients at Tall Timber Lodge in Pittsburg. He estimated he gets about 20 visitors from Canada each year at his 35 vacation rental units, which he rents out nightly and weekly. It’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to the “thousands” of other clients who visit, he said.

The Canadians who do come are keeping their reservations so far.

“I don’t see them canceling and not coming to visit our area,” Caron said. “I just don’t know, if they’ve always come to northern New Hampshire to recreate and fish, I think they’re still going to come.”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.