The Current - U.S. border towns lose tourism dollars as Canadians stay home

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Canadian tourists were once regular shoppers at Ali Hayton’s grocery store in Washington state, but these days she’s more likely to get “nasty emails” from Canadians angry about U.S. tariffs. Guest host Mark Kelley talks to business owners about the sharp drop in Canadians travelling to the U.S., and the impact on border communities who rely on tourism dollars to survive.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Well, all across the country, Canadians are getting ready for the long weekend and in years past, this might have meant heading south of the border for shopping and vacationing this weekend and all summer long for that matter. Now with tariffs and threats to Canadian sovereignty, cross-border travel is way down. Statistics Canada says that in April, trips by land dropped 35% compared to the same time last year. That's having an impact on border communities in the United States

So we're gonna check in with some of those communities Allie Hayton is the owner of the Point Roberts International Marketplace that's in Washington State just south of British Columbia Allie good morning Morning, Mark You've sort of got this geographic anomaly where you are in Point Roberts. For people who aren't familiar with it on a map, describe it to us. It's almost like Alaska to the north. The only way you can get to it by land is driving through Canada.

Tell us about your connection to Canada. Yeah. The 49th parallel divides us. It's a two by one square mile piece of land that you drive up into British Columbia, head west as far as you can go, and then you drop back down. So it's beautiful. It's surrounded by water on three sides. It's gorgeous.

It's peaceful. And it's just been really, really struggling the last five years. So I was about to say, maybe it's a little too peaceful these days. For my taste, for sure. Yeah, tell us about, well, first, you run this store in Point Roberts. Tell us about your store. Well, it's a 38,000 square foot grocery store. We're built to serve 8,000 customers a week, especially in the summer,

because it's a summer location. 70% of the homes there are built or owned by Canadians. They're summer homes. They're homes that have been in their family for generations. 70% of the homes there are built or owned by Canadians. They're summer homes, they're homes that have been in their family for generations. And they come down on long weekends, like hopefully this weekend, summer vacation, spring break, and they just spend their time there.

We also just get a lot of traffic from border towns in Canada where people wanna come down and buy gas and milk and cheese and beer and wine and all those fun little American things that you can't get in Canada. We have the same reciprocal thing. I remember as a kid going up to Victoria and buying Canadian candy that I couldn't get in America. It's just always been easy back and forth. We have two drawers in every cash register

We take Canadian cash and American cash And it's just we've been we have everything Except for we don't We don't have a pharmacy. There's no place to get your hair done. No place to get your nails done. No veterinarians. No anything else really. A lot of parcel pickups and gasoline and me. Yeah, well it's convenience and yeah I know a lot of Canadians can relate to that for cross-border shoppers. We've done this all our lives but now things have changed. Tell

us about the change with the talk of with the tariffs, with the talk of the 51st state. What is the impact what have you seen directly in point Roberts Oh directly so I honestly thought when this started it was rhetoric it was just to get the border secure and once we've got once we had that done we were this was over I'm actually shocked that it's gone this far every time our president called Trudeau governor or mentioned the 51st state, I would just wanna crawl into my skin.

I just, I don't understand it. So I totally understand the Canadian sentiment of elbows up and don't come after us. And the thing that surprised me was how angry they got at us as individual people. I got some nasty emails that I wasn't expecting as a grocery store owner. But I understand it. Tell me about that. What kind of nasty emails would you get as a grocery store owner?

Like I said, at the beginning, what I thought it was was just going to go away. And somebody, a reporter asked me, how do you feel about EB telling people to boycott your store and your community? And I said, I was devastated. How can a leader in a foreign country tell people to boycott me? I didn't do anything wrong. And people took that as me blaming EB for all of this. And I wasn't do anything wrong and people took that as me blaming EB for all of this and I wasn't.

I put all the blame of this on our administration. So when that piece ran, I just got, you know, oh you Americans, I hope you just all go, you love your guns, go kill each other. I hope everything rots on the shelves. You know Ali, I read that article, it was in the Globe and Mail, and there was another quote in there from another colleague of yours in Point Roberts. The quote was, if we don't get the support from the Canadians, this town will die. Do you agree with that?

We've got to get support from somewhere and I don't know where else it can come from. We've gotten zero from our county. We get a little bit of lip service from the state, but they're not actually doing anything. I don't know where else it can come from. We've gotten zero from our county. We get a little bit of lip service from the state, but they're not actually doing anything. And the federal government, obviously, is not doing anything to help. So there's three restaurants left.

Two of them are on the ropes. The lady's just mortgaged everything to keep them open. One of the parcel businesses that's been there for 24 years closed last month. Nobody wants to come and invest there because they just after COVID with the border closings, we had nobody ever saw that coming. So we didn't know really how to react to that. And, and then we kind of built our way back, but we never really got this. So when your border traffic says we're down 35%, that's 35% from last year,

where we were still down 20% from pre-COVID levels. So we're really just, it's just fighting to hang on. Like I said, my store is 38,000 square feet. If it was built to just serve that community, it could survive at 10,000 square feet and much fewer employees and a lot less overhead. But it's never been that it has always been there to serve both communities. And I ran a promotion over Easter weekend taking Canadian cash at 80%, which brought a lot of people in and just kind of I'm trying to remind people that we're the same people we've always been Yes, we have an administration. That's really hard to

Stomach right now with all of this, but we still need to be there when times are good for you So we kind of need you to be here for us when they're not in order for us to survive And what has been the impact on your bottom line? At least 30% every week to last year. So to pre-COVID years, you're talking 45% to 50% down. Yeah. You know, I've heard people talk about this. And people say, hey, look, it's nothing personal,

that we're not coming down there. But for you, you know, with these strong ties on both sides of the border, is it starting to feel personal? I know nobody means it that way. But I think what they don't understand is the long term effects of their decision to boycott. I totally get the sentiment. but I've got people who depend on me for to pay their mortgage, to have health insurance, to put clothes on their kids backs. And if I don't have the customer count and the traffic to keep them all on, I don't know what else to do. I'm a very positive person and I'm hoping things turn around. I'm excited that Canada elected a new prime minister and the relationship there with him

and Trump seems to be better than it was with Trudeau. And I'm hoping they can make some progress quickly and we can remind people that this is affecting real people. There's no manufacturing here, there's no hotels, it is what it is, there's not a lot we can do, we just keep trying to do what we do best and that's provide excellent customer service and provide the products that people want. I wonder, yeah, you're still there. And I wonder at this point, Ali, who do you appeal to? I mean, do you appeal to Canadians to, you know, just help us out? Or do you appeal to your American politicians to say, look, this has got to change? I mean, what's the strategy?

We're trying everything. You're trying to. We're trying everything. You're trying to be... We're trying everything. Yeah, we had a round table with our US Senator and a couple of mayors from some border towns in Canada. Are they listening? They're listening. I just don't know if they have any clout.

I don't know if there's anything they can do. And the one thing I have learned, I did get a couple of emails on a last interview that where people were saying, well, oh, it was when I did my promotion. And one of them was, you can take Canadian at par, we'll never come back there. And I just, I took the time to respond and just say, you know what, I hear you and I feel your frustration and I'm really sorry. And I just hope that we can be here when this is all over

and you decide to come back." And four out of five of those people responded immediately and just said, thank you. Thank you for hearing me and we wish you the best. So I think the rest of us all just have to keep, following the golden rule and treat others how you wanna be treated and remind them that we are all just people. Regardless of what our administration is doing, there are real people that are suffering the consequences and we just

got to keep trying. Ali, I wish you all the best. Thank you, Mark. Ali Hayton is the owner of the Point Roberts International Marketplace. When we started Crime Story a year and a half ago, there was one name as the owner of the Point Roberts International Marketplace. When we started Crime Story a year and a half ago, there was one name at the top of my dream guest list, Keith Morrison. I've never felt like a big get before.

Wow, that's kind of cool. I'm Kathleen Goltar, and this week on Crime Story, I sit down with one of the most famous names in true crime. I did not want to join that party. I was not keen on covering true crime. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts. We're heading now to the other end of the Canada-US border to Vermont. Heidi Tappan is the co-owner of the North Hero House Inn and Restaurant.

Heidi, good morning. Good morning, Mark. And I know you were just listening into our conversation. How familiar is this experience to you? Well, I really feel for her in that I didn't understand where she's located and she's really has it to be extreme, it seems. But we're all feeling it. There's a ton of personal sadness, a lot of hugs that happen when we do see our Canadian

friends and they come across and share who they are. We hug each other and there's sadness there. We've known them a long time. I've lived here my whole life and I'm only 20 minutes from the border and a little over an hour to Montreal. So we have gone back and forth. And then I'm on the lake. I'm on an island.

I'm in the Champlain Islands on the lake. And so by boat or by land, we're that close. And so life in Vermont is always about sharing the joys of Champlain, playing with our Canadian neighbors. We have similar values of love and love of nature and serenity. So yeah. Yeah, Heidi, you grew up in Vermont and I grew up in Montreal. I know exactly where you are. We spent a lot of time growing up going down to Burlington. And where you are is a beautiful location. And there always has been this strong tie between the Canadians and especially in Vermont.

We used to kid around that you were like another province. Now if we were to say that, that seems like a loaded comment these days. But what's been the impact on your business? Well, we are definitely seeing, we tried to just, we had planned to do Canadian at par because of our slower season and we launched it the same That literally like the same day around the same day that the terrorists were Announced and we got some Angry comments and we had to pull it back So you got angry comments from who? From Americans? From Canadians?

Who? From Canadians. From the Canadians, yeah. They just said that we're boycotting you and we don't care if you have it at par. And we get how people are feeling. And so since then, so we did that because we're open year-round, but we're quite seasonal in that we're in the Champlain Islands, so it's a much slower time for us there. A lot of Canadians have summer homes there. But we are continuing to extend an offer to our Canadian neighbors and for all Canadian residents offering Canadian at par

for the foreseeable future, the guests would need to book direct. And but that's what we're doing. We're saying we're in it with you. And we miss you and we'd love to see you. And so if this helps, great. And if you're you don't feel good about coming down then we hope you know We hope and plan to still be here when things shift. Do you understand the How Canadians feel right now? Well only so much so when you're not standing in someone else's shoes, right? So of course we And we we love we you know, for us going across the border, especially from Vermont, if you know it so well, it's like a portal into another world. Like it gets electrified as you go

over and you feel that cultural change. I mean, we love having a neighboring country. How cool is that? And so for that to be discussed in the way that the current administration is discussing it is just jaw dropping. I don't really know what to say. And in terms of the tariffs, I get it. I get it. If that's what everybody so chooses understandably, then we respect it. We would still love to receive people and enjoy time together as we always have. You know, in Canada, there's this feeling of hurt and betrayal. But what do you want on this side of the border? But what do you want Canadians to know about you, fellow business owners down there and local neighbors? What do you want us to know about you, fellow business owners down there and local neighbors?

What do you want us to know? Well, I don't think it's any secret that Vermont did not vote for the current administration. So regarding me and where we are in our state, we are suffering for something we also didn't vote for. Now, that being said, I'm not trying to take the suffering away from Canada. I mean, we feel sick about it. We don't feel any differently about Canadians. We love Canadians. I have a ton of Canadian friends. I mean, we are, Canadian friends. I mean, we are, we value their, you know, we value the country and the border. I mean, I grew up going to Plaza Zar and the Forum and having the best marzipan ever. And so I still, of course, go. But to feel, to feel, it's sort of like a family member to feel that hurt and sadness. You feel helpless, like your hands are tied behind your back.

You feel so sad. And so when I do see people at our businesses, we hug each other. And I just say, I'm sorry. You feel sad because it's not something we agree with. And yet we're all facing this situation. And so we understand the hurt.

But to know that it's not something that we align with. Yeah, I saw, I was reading, and it was a few weeks ago, there was a gathering of Canadians, Americans in Vermont, and trying to put this message out that, you know, this has got to change. What can, what can, I mean, politically, because this is because this is a 100% political situation, politically what do you think can be done? Are you resigned to the fact that this is going to be for at least the next four years

or as long as the Trump is in power? Are you resigned to that reality or do you think that there can be a change? I'm never resigned to anything. That doesn't feel good, honestly. I have a lot of hope. In the Champlain Islands, there is a coalition, a group of people who have sent a formal apology

to our Canadian neighbours. We as humans can do a lot. I'm looking at the opportunities where we can engage as that formal apology was one, sitting around the table with our Canadian friends as I did just a couple of days ago, they came down, they have a house on the islands

and we chatted and we commiserated a bit together and laughed and had a little drink together and it goes a long way. In terms of things really, you know, changing, we just have to do everything that we can. So looking for those opportunities and we as a business are still saying, and we get it if people choose not to, but we're still saying we offer Canadian at par

for our accommodations for the foreseeable future. So that's, you know, so we take a hit on that, but everybody is. So we're sort of like saying, you know, we're partners in this. Let's see if we can make it through this together. I admire your sense of optimism, and I think we all need to hold on to that optimism. But let me ask you this, because I've heard this, you know, anecdotally from people I know, conversations overheard, who said things will never be the same with the US.

After this, there's no going back. How do you feel about that? Do you think that we're going through this very difficult period of time, but it's something that we can pass through? Or do you think things have been changed irreversibly? I without a doubt feel that it's not that it can change. It's an administration as you said you very clearly you know that it's a political situation and and I think almost the bordering towns have a have

a better well we have a really clear perspective because we have so many relationships I mean I grew up on the border also, and so many of my friends were French Canadians. I mean, it's just the way that it is. And so there's a lot of love there. And so I think because it's a political situation, it's not really the people that are wanting this, that we have an opportunity to go back to being the friendly neighboring countries that we've been. Let's hope for that.

Heidi, hang in there and stay strong. Thanks so much. I appreciate your time, Mark. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.