Airline demand between Canada and United States collapses, down 70%+

I promise you, despite whatever you've read or polls you've seen, Americans do not "largely support" going to war with Canada.

> but driving around with Ontario plates now that 30-50% of the population has been told to hate me isn't inviting.

I went to Idaho once in a car with California (CA) plates, ended up stopping in a fairly small town overnight before heading to see some of the parks. The person at the front desk of the hotel I stayed at noticed the CA plates and suggested I remove them (even offered a screwdriver they kept at the front desk for the situation) because they've had multiple cars with CA plates vandalized, specifically for being from CA. This was years ago, so not even strictly related to the current insanity.

I can absolutely believe that with the current climate, there are places close to the Canada border where parking in the wrong area with Canada plates would draw unwanted attention.

> Even though I'm fairly confident that I wouldn't be detained at the border under dubious pretexts

Hope your identity is not connected to this account because you just gave the reason.

The previous round of Trump, a former prime minister of Norway even got stopped for a while for the "crime" of having an Iranian stamp in his passport. With it being several times worse now, I understand many are apprehensive of going. https://www.thejournal.ie/kjell-magne-bondevik-washington-ai...

NYTimes' article on the event in case anyone is interested: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/world/europe/us-france-sc...

> I would expect many conferences to have less and less international attendees in the coming years.

It's starting: https://boycott-ietf127.org/

Americans are very welcome in Canada. Come visit.

We just don't want to spend our money there, or be around MAGA apologists.

Yes, no doubt. We would occasionally go anyways for unique snacks or Trader Joes, but not anymore.

Reading between the lines, she had her visa cancelled previously. She then seems to have flown from Canada to Mexico and applied at the border and I'm guessing this bit but probably filled the form wrong like not saying about the cancelled visa. Then the mucked up bit is rather than just refused entry she was put down for deportation but Mexico doesn't take non Mexican deportees so she ended up in the nasty holding system for illegal immigrants there. The US banned her from entering for five years so I think there must have been an error/deception on the application.

I guess the answer if you are Canadian is sort it out at the embassy or if you are chancing things do it at the Canada/US border not the Mexican one.

As someone from Buffalo it is (anecdotally) pretty common for Canadians to come here to fly to other parts of the US for cheaper, and for us to go to Toronto for cheaper international flights.

I'm trying to understand your point but failing. Where does 24% come from? People understand exchange rates.

CAD 1 = USD 0.76

So if my Canada-origin flight price is CAD 100, and the equivalent flight out of a US airport is USD 76 (24% less dollar-to-dollar), I'm not saving any money.

Exactly. It’s being felt the same way Georgia and Ukraine have come to feel about Russia.

The US can no longer be trusted. They’ve squandered a century of friendship. For nothing.

The thing I don't get is that if Canada became part of the US, Republicans would never hold power again. Don't they know that?

That makes me think this is all asinine rhetoric to

(1) squeeze Canada, Europe, and other allies of the trade deficit goodwill for a quick buck. That stuff America used to maintain global soft power and hegemony - cashing it in for a quick buck.

(2) run quick and chaotic pump and dumps where donors get to make enormous alpha on the market volatility (this could seriously just be market manipulation games?), and/or

(3) satisfy the geopolitical powers that may or may not be underwriting Trump, Musk, Gabbard, et al. Saudis, Russians, and Chinese. Several of this gang are politically exposed persons, possibly with exposure or debts to all three groups.

> Are Americans not aware that their head of state is threatening to annex us? Oh, and judging from social media comments, his supporters think this is a really nifty, clever idea. Why do you think this is about a trade dispute?

I don't see why you guys can't dislike us for more than one reason. The annexation threat, and then the weird tariff demands that came out of left field, they both seem like good reasons, and you could even treat them as addition.

Canada had tariffs before Trump. Now Canada is mad about the U.S. having tariffs? Canada can engage in protectionism but when others return the favor, it’s a problem?

The US was never our friend. More like an abusive older sibling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...

Unfortunately we are dependent on them. Hopefully, this will cause us to start weening ourselves off of a single predatory partner.

Apparently ~4000 new ones are issued to Canadians every year. Canadians have access to TN though which is way easier to get. I imagine everyone on a visa is strongly reconsidering any non-essential travel outside the US and giving the border guards an accompanying attempt to screw you.

AFAIK literally no contemporary US politician but Trump has ever entertained the idea of annexing another country, but I have zero confidence that anyone around him would do anything but roll over if he gave the order. He isn't just pretending to be crazy for galaxy-brained game-theoretic reasons, he literally is crazy and unpredictable and surrounded by shameless enablers. Even though the military would be legally obligated to refuse an unlawful order from him, I no longer have any confidence that they actually would.

>but we take it very seriously up here.

Canadians were always insecure, the recent events just exacerbated it and brought it to the fore. Canadians have to have a hard look at themselves, they overall fare poorly on many fronts: jobs, taxes, housing and (gasp!) healthcare compared to the US. If they fared better they would not feel so threatened/outraged. I'm however pessimistic that they are capable of that level of introspection, because the smartest/wisest Canadians have already left and immigrated to the US. These smart/wise people always knew their country was sub-par despite the delusional rhetoric of superiority that Canadians often indulge in against the US (we have 'free' healthcare!).

Let's not trivialize Trump by calling him "orange man", please. Hitler was a whiny little shit nugget as well, but that didn't limit the amount of abject evil he was able to orchestrate. The problem with whiny little shit nuggets is they attract other whiny shit nuggets, and they bond (clump up) over their shared persecution complex. And now we've got a real problem on our hands.

In the context of Canada, as an American all I can say is sorry and also thank you for doing everything in your power to resist "our" dictator since our own federal government is abjectly failing.

It's been a few days since I read that article but wasn't she unaware her visa had expired? Either way, the way she was treated was barbaric and if I had the good fortune to be Canadian I wouldn't risk it either.

Yep. As a former Canadian soldier, it was a pretty shit afternoon when I had to explain to my kids what annexation meant in practical terms, and the role that Canada has played in preventing and repelling similar actions in other countries.

It's an easy word to say, and the implication that it would be peaceful or non-violent because of economic pressures ignores the fact that Canadians don't want it.

If your Congress person is Republican, they are much more afraid of being primaried by someone who tows the line and is being financed by Musk than their constituents.

I wonder if at some point Canada will start accepting political refugees from the US.

From 98 to roughly 2015, I used to drive or fly up for the Vancouver Folk Festival. My favorite was crossing into BC at 1-2am. “Why are you here?” “The folk festival”. “Are you a musician?” “Nope, just one of the folk.” “Have a great time!”

Best border encounter.

There is way too much red tape for an American to visit Cuba.

I bet you don’t live near older, more conservative brainwashed, Floridians.

https://torontolife.com/real-estate/real-estate-florida-snow...

Yup. Not a lot of them will ditch the USA on existing scheduled conferences. They'll just see their attendance plummet. It'll take at least a year for them to move venues. The amount of planning required for conferences is not minimal, and they are planned at least 1 year in advance. You will see the effect in 2026 and if you think conferences won't move over the next 2 years you're fooling yourself.

Trump and his incompetence is fkn the United States. He thinks he's tough. Maga thinks he's tough. He's a clown.

You go on vacation to enjoy yourself. It's hard to enjoy yourself when you are embarrassed. Why don't you think this is rational?

Plenty of US citizens are canceling their vacations because they are afraid of reciprocity of treatment by immigration and people in other countries. And some US citizens, yes citizens especially immigrants & minorities, are also worried about abuse by border patrol upon their return.

No one wants to go on a vacation where they have to deal with unnecessary stress.

My wife and I were in Greece while the inhabitants were angry at Germany for the freshly introduced austerity measures. We sometimes spoke Flemish to each other, which for them sounded like German. We got some anger directed at us a few times from random people around us, and a shopkeeper stormed outside and threatened us with violence, completely unprovoked . We were very confused, we didn't know what we were doing wrong, and never saw that on previous visits. When our penny finally dropped and we made clear everywhere we were from Belgium, not Germany, the mood lightened considerably and we got apologies.

It might not be wise to loudly declare yourself American in the EU or Canada right now.

That's very open-minded of you.

The people who voted for Trump should be held responsible for what they've enabled. This could end with a lot of people dying (e.g. being unprepared for epidemics or cutting off welfare programs).

That must be new.

I was an American in Austria during the first Gulf War, and people were pretty hostile to both me and my wife.

But then, Austria does tend to its own thing.

Can’t those 14,000 workers learn to code? https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/47...

How about Canada drop their tariffs? Canada had tariffs long before Trump came around. And nobody is seriously threatening to annex Canada.

Security in the US is an euphemism for all that. Linguistically it works like, "defense."

It's astonishing to an outsider that U.S. politics is so openly available to be influenced by money - I would consider that to be outright corruption.

Yeah, but my writing style on personal projects comes in fits. I'm 2100 words in and only just got to the section on immediately visible effects of these policies, like the EU scouting domestic cloud capacity; this will be added to said section, obviously, along with other travel or commercial data I can get my hands on.

The CTA portion is pretty straightforward though, and worth sharing now: stop trying to revive a rotting corpse (America), and start figuring out what we can build to replace it that addresses its flaws and harms. Now's the time to do the big, hard work like equal rights, universal healthcare, eliminating monopolies, fixing taxation, limiting scope of government structures, reforming the MIC, streamlining immigration, protecting workers, etc, because the America of old is dead.

Grab the Constitution, hold a Congress of representatives put forward by like-minded states, and rebuild. It's what the Founding Fathers intended, after all, when their grand experiment finally ran its course. It wasn't the final deliverable, just version 1.0 - so now let's sit down and write version 2.0, a modern Constitution for a modern people.

I live my life constantly preparing for the worst case scenario; it's what serves me well in my career in IT (if the building isn't on fire from a nuclear strike with zombies at the gates, it's a good day!), but it does mean I'm always interpreting smoke on the horizon as a wildfire and calling it in - even though it's often just campers roasting marshmallows. I say this so my words and position have more context for readers like yourself, in that I'm preparing for things that aren't likely to happen, but you're grateful someone prepared for it when they do.

So when I say we're done, it's because I genuinely see so much smoke on the horizon that I know there's a wildfire there. Companies and governments don't start openly talking about changing vendors or building out infrastructure for funsies - they do it after they've made the decision internally to NOPE out elsewhere. The amount of harm and damage done already simply cannot be overstated, because we're only seeing the damage they haven't hidden. While everyone focuses on one Signal chat a journalist was invited into, people like me are worrying about how many more have already disappeared forever, and how widespread its use internally is for avoiding records and accountability laws.

The snowballs have already started down the hill, and it takes years to stop them. By the time we get into a position to stop these, they'll already have grown into avalanches of knock-on effects and repercussions - nevermind the hundreds of other snowballs having been sent downhill since we started responding to this initial volley. Institutions take decades to build, and minutes to destroy; it's why they're entrusted with so much power, after all.

All of this is to say that I really think people need to stop thinking we have time to reverse or stop these harms, and accept the harms have already happened, so what do we do now?

> Have you ever tried to migrate anything non-trivial on one cloud to another? Vendor lock-in is very real.

Yep! It's very real if you use vendor-exclusive tooling, and it's why I was the perpetual wet blanket in meetings where leaders would push for said tooling over, say, Terraform or Kubernetes.

Still, it's easier than you think for most LOB applications out there. It's really just the in-house custom stuff or products that will take longer to move, but make no mistake - the smart players have already started said moves elsewhere in some form. Maybe it's tasking the architects with identifying gaps between cloud vendors, or adding new sprint backlog items to remove proprietary dependencies on AWS/Azure/GCP over the coming FY, or tasking Engineering with a POC for a major application component "just to weigh our options".

It's in motion.

I don't get why people think business and politics aren't two sides of the same triangle, or that economics is some holy force that is guaranteed to produce ideal outcomes 100% of the time.

Companies do business with China because it was cheap, and now because they must. China could quintuple prices overnight, and nobody (outside the EU, and even then only in part) could do anything about it. Everyone else dismantled domestic supply chains for manufacturing, resource extraction and refinement, and assembly. They lack the educated and diverse workforces needed for modern labor, opting instead for a wide chasm between office workers and everyone else with little to no in between. The only reason China doesn't do this is because it'd be politically disadvantageous, which is the side of the game they're playing right now (hence the military buildup, provocation of the USA and neighboring countries, and an expansionist foreign policy). India and SEA are years away from being comparable in capacity and scale to China, and that assumes no geopolitical instability in the region that disrupts their own progress.

Economics is as fungible as business and politics are at the end of the day, because they're all on the same triangle. Entities align to different parts of that triangle, sure, but there is no "sweet spot" that guarantees a given outcome, nor is there some magic force that will "fix" the balance of the triangle. Economics, politics, and businesses aren't equivalent to some "moral arc of the universe" argument - they're just points of a shape that everyone and every action must fall between, with varying outcomes.

> The curse of growing up in a rich country during prosperity is that every single issue is the most serious problem your country has faced in your entire lifetime.

Oh, no, it's not just me saying this. Friends who grew up in dirt poor countries with totalitarian regimes and fled to the USA, are now openly wondering if they should've gone to the EU instead given the sudden about-face. Peers who lived through democratic collapses into authoritarianism are screaming that "this is how it ends, not how it begins". I'm hardly the only one saying this.

> And even if you're right and the US as we know it is done, it's not because of one orange man with an attitude.

Never said it was? Like, their actions certainly acted as a strong wakeup call to the rest of the world that we are done, that the era of American Hegemony is over, but it's also a long time coming. My personal argument is that this has been in motion since midway through Carter's administration, and has been its own snowball of policy decisions and dismantling of institutions for short-term gains, seizing acquired capital from profitable enterprise rather than reinvesting it into future growth.

> The US became so strong because it used right the once-in-a-millenium opportunity where its engineers would run circles around other countries.

Yeah, nah, that's a side-effect of good institutions but not a root cause of prosperity. We used to have the best engineers, manufacturers, refineries, and extraction companies in the world, until we kept the Corporate HQs and outsource everything elsewhere. We sacrificed long-term growth for short-term gains, and that's something that causes harm regardless of population density or growth.

Your argument kinda goes all over the place to try overplay how important the US' highly-educated domestic workforce was to its successes, and downplay the harms to the underlying systems caused by a rejection of long-term strategic planning in favor of wealth pumps and short-term thinking. I don't quite know how to respond to that without picking it apart line-by-line, and that time would be better served finishing my dang essay.

And this is why Canadians are deeply concerned. Nobody is reigning in your leaders that are continuing to frequently repeat comments about annexing Canada and using economic force to do so.

I've traveled to the US extensively for work in the past. It's the most inward facing country I have ever seen. The international news items that virtually every other western country reports on the front page of news reports get buried in the USA. Everything we see shows that Americans just don't care about the impact of their actions on people outside of their country, even when those actions are military invasion.

It's deeply disturbing to Canadians.

> Purely hypothetical as I can't see why customs officers would want to deny citizens entry (providing they're not racist etc).

Well, you already provided one answer to your own question. But another is that plenty of people in law enforcement in the US are there because they want to have power over people, CBP included. So why would they deny entry, or make it a hassle? Cus it's fun to them to have the ability to ruin someone's day on a tiny whim; It makes them feel powerful.

> Would your citizen rights disappear and then you could have no way to defend your position?

They would be delayed.

They can/will detain you for made-up reasons if they want to.

Simple example:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna195406

Folks I know who are concerned about this:

- folks of Latino heritage

- folks with African (black and Arab) or Asian (East, South… really all of it) heritage

- naturalized citizens

- Muslims

- anyone who may share a name with a criminal immigrant by coincidence —- I have a super Anglo name, but I was almost locked up once by police for sharing a name with a guy with a long rap sheet

Eventually your rights will come around, but they can put those on hold for way longer than one may want.

Another simple example — an acquaintance of mine was arrested for dui on a Friday night. He was “lost” in the system for four days, and that was with people at the jail ready to pay bail the next morning. It turns out that he was to be released without bail after he sobered up, but… whoopsie. He has no recourse, and those four days in jail were not good for his mental health.

Unless we are lawyers, or unless we are willing to sacrifice our time, we are not interested in educating the officer and practicing on the laws. I think it’s a fight of two bullies, us with the laws on our side and them with the authorities on their side.

Yes, horrible exchange rate. I was going to say you're cherry picking your stats, but it's more like you're cherry picking your conclusion. Just look at a graph of the USD CAD exchange rate over the past 25 years - the current rate looks pretty horrible to me, and while it's been bad before it's currently near the worst it's been in 25 years.

On the bright side, we maybe finally can ban all the trans fats!

> The GOP, not just Trump.

Pretty sure the GOP is just Trump MAGA now. Not sure who, if any, the holdouts are now.

It’s funny that a country so wound up in national pride as the USA can’t see that an existential threat to your countries sovereignty triggers a deep emotional response.

They're only "supporting" it because he said it and they're fucking cowards. Nobody else was talking about this before, not even the MAGA crazies.

The return crossing is a huge concern. I have already decided I am not comfortable taking any international trips for the foreseeable future.

I do not need thugs at the border to give me a hard time because they feel empowered to do whatever they want. My non-white (but Americans born) partner is even more concerned. Sure, they have to let you back into the country, but they can make it painful.

ICE picking up people off the street is a thing that is now happening too.

"because rules" isn't valid in the context of the US right now.

The faith, respect and trust of the US to follow its own rules is utterly destroyed.

It's really hard to overstate that the trust level is now a hard zero and it's likely staying there for decades.

They can detain you and have done that since the preclearance area is considered US soil.

I'm sure that you have a point, according to written policy and law.

Trump has made a point of not caring about stuff like that, so who really knows?

The state of "the law" in the United States is that you can be grabbed off the street at any point, denied a trial and detained indefinitely. As someone outside the US I would not risk visiting even if it's "unlikely". Especially as a member of a minority that is currently unpopular with the US government.

> hoover-age

I presume that you allude to a vacuuming kind of process of your details, but rather apt now that the US has entered a new Hoover age.

Much lower risk, ok. But the question is, why risk it instead of going elsewhere? To the Bahamas instead of Florida?

Given the current situation, people also may not want to hand over their personal information and identity to be stored in a US government database.

What you say is true. There are still enormous numbers of people entering the US without problems. What's happened is an extremely low-probability event became slightly more probable, but still very improbable. Nonetheless, it's totally understandable that it makes people not want to risk it. If you liked to hike on a certain mountain and then found that, while the risk of being struck by lightning on an average day is one in 20 million, the risk of being struck while hiking on that particular mountain is one is one in 5 million, wouldn't you consider hiking on a different mountain? There's no denying the situation has gotten significantly worse, and for many people who don't have a pressing need to come to the US, that's enough to make it not worth it to come.

More like a grand cavitation or amputation.

I saw an article the other day about how there was suddenly a non-shortage of fancy bourbons on store shelves in the US. How before the rare bottles were order only and marked up extremely high and not available, but now you could just get them on sale right off the shelf.

All of this was reported with a bit of speculation here and there but not once mentioning what is the most likely reason:

The largest liquor importer in the world (Ontario LCBO) just removed all American products from its shelves and in some cases was even able to return those products back to the distributor with refund.

Those products are on American shelves because they are no long being sold to non-Americans. Because of actions by the Trump regime. Not mentioned in the article I read (major US newspaper)

I also saw a series of articles about oceanside properties in Maine being in trouble because their Quebecois regulars are cancelling bookings for this summer.

They kept saying it was about tariffs. I didn't see a single article that mentioned annexation threats and digs at our sovereignty.

It's really weird, the selective blindness.

I think US moderates want so badly for things to be relatively normal that they can't take this stuff seriously or it's a complete demoralization.

That and the press is completely under his thumb this time around.

The "country" is hinting? What exactly does that look like? The Americans I just spent a week with were lovely.

I mean, that's the most positive spin for it I've ever heard. Maybe he's shorted every major company in the US that would be affected by these stupid tariffs.

Not with those popularity figures, there aren't.

Reality is there are zero pro-Trump rallies, and plenty of very angry former Trump voters making their rage felt at Town Halls.

This will only get worse over time as cuts to essential services start to bite hard.

I've said all along I think the MAGA cult thing is going to blow up in the faces of the people making this happen.

A "huge proportion" is about 10%. Republicans are 30% of the population, and only about 1/3 of Republicans self-identify as MAGA. A majority of independents vote Republican, but a negligible fraction of those identify as MAGA.

10% of the US is still huge in absolute terms, though.

Carney just needs to leverage the fuck out of that contract instead of tearing it up outright. The defense lobby will always have the ear of the GOP.

Unfortunately the F35 thing is similar to many other things that are unfortunate about this relationship.

We'd be a fool to buy them, but we will be absolutely punished if we don't. Last time this was under question Bombardier -- one of our largest companies, and employers -- started to "suddenly" lose contracts in the US and the Canadian gov't backpedaled (for other reasons as well) and went ahead with the F35. They're worried that will happen again

That and so much money and time have already been invested on this, and the alternatives are not super compelling.

Well he is a rapist too. And if the documents charges from mar-a-lago had been allowed to go to trial he would have been fucked.

> what the probability / details are for the non-happy-path processes

Why would one expect to enter a country via a "non-happy-path" and expect a happy outcome?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwal...

"The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles."

The non-happy-path didn't start under the current POTUS...

Yup… as a Brit who’s holidayed, been to conferences and done business in the US I currently have zero interest in going there ATM

The job market for one is brutal. It’s all interconnected. Its been leading up to this for some time.

This by a mile.

Anecdotally, by buddy runs a few bnb’s in cottage country in Ontario. Bookings for the summer are mimicking that pandemic surge in 2020/21. It’s wild out there right now.