���߲ݴ�ý

If he stays home, he’ll miss the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif. which he’s attended nearly every year since 1997 and is essential to his work. But if he goes, he says, he’ll be wracked with guilt.

“It just seems like it’s un-Canadian, you know?” said Currell, from Toronto. “My $3,000 is so small — it’s just a minor amount of money to the U.S. economy — but it’s like, what else can you do to protest these tariffs?”

It is the dilemma many Canadians are facing this year, as pre-booked travel — and, in some cases, thousands of dollars in sunken costs — goes head-to-head with a .

Canadians made more than 20 million visits to the U.S. in 2024, according to the U.S. Travel Association, more than to any other country. Along the way, they generated some $20.5 billion (U.S.) in spending and supported 140,000 jobs.

But in the first months of 2025, times have changed. Trump has twice slapped, then delayed, 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, and repeatedly threatened the country with annexation — a threat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau .

“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy,” Trudeau said, “because that will make it easier to annex us.”

Canadians have already started to pivot away from the U.S.

Travel agency Flight Centre Travel Group Canada said leisure bookings to U.S. cities compared to last year, and one in five of their customers have cancelled trips to the States over the past three months.

Meanwhile, U.S.-bound flights from Flair Airlines are down 24 per cent year-over-year for March, according to aviation data firm Cirium. Air Transat has seen a similar 12 per cent drop.

Amid all the political turmoil, many can’t stomach a trip south.

Francine Cochrane, co-owner of Playcation Travel, which specializes in theme park vacations, has seen a sizable shift away from U.S. travel. American vacations previously made up around 70 per cent of her business; now, it’s down to 30 per cent, she estimated, while all-inclusive vacations to Mexico and the Dominican Republic have seen a huge uptick.

She’s also had customers sticking with their plans — but saying they won’t post about it or tell anyone.

“They don’t want the judgment from others,” Cochrane said.

Stacey Sayer of Kirkland Lake, Ont. spent $2,500 for five plane tickets to Disney World in Orlando, Fla., but when Trump began threatening Canada’s sovereignty, she couldn’t bring herself to make the trip.

“I wouldn’t have had fun at all,” she said. “I would’ve felt sick to my stomach the whole time I was there.”

So Sayer cancelled the trip, eating the $2,500 and instead booking a weeklong trip to Mexico. She doesn’t plan on returning to the U.S. anytime soon and has already nixed a potential trip to Nashville, Tenn. to see an AC/DC concert in May.

Amy Gleiser of Paris, Ont., had planned a 10-day trip with her husband Matthew and daughters Brielle and Jasmine to Myrtle Beach, S.C. They would have left in early March, but made the decision to cancel the trip when Trump first threatened tariffs at the end of January.

“It’s disgraceful,” Gleiser said. “The United States is not a place that we want to visit and we do sort of have this sense of, I don’t know, sort of being betrayed by our friends.”

Andrea Traynor, a GTA-based content creator who runs the blog, cancelled a bucket-list 50th birthday trip to Napa, Calif., for similar reasons — and has stopped working with U.S. travel sponsors and destinations, something that has created a “financial loss” for her.

“You don’t see Ukrainian content creators heading to Russia and encouraging their readers and followers to do the same. Like, that would be weird,” Traynor said. “And so while we aren’t in a military war … it sure feels like it could be heading in that direction.”

But Traynor also said she doesn’t feel people who already have vacations booked — and could be losing thousands of dollars if they cancel — should feel guilty about travelling.

Katie McKenna falls into that category. The Toronto resident is headed to Nashville for a bachelorette party that was planned before the U.S. election, and she’s already spent $800 on plane tickets. She said she feels “a little bit” guilty, but because of the money committed and the big group involved, she’s stuck with it.

“Even if there’s a pang of guilt, in today’s economy I don’t think I’m going to judge anyone for not wanting to back out of a four-digit-level commitment,” McKenna said.

For Currell, headed to San Francisco and the video game conference, the clock is ticking to make a decision.

“This is occupying too much of my brain,” he said. “Every time I have some idle brain time, I’m thinking about this situation. It’s crazy, you know. It’s absolutely insane.”

With files from The Canadian Press