Assessing the Buy Canadian movement one year later

Canada and the United States have both benefited from decades of free trade. But US tariffs significantly changed this relationship, and Canadians reacted. In our research, we explore the Buy Canadian sentiment one year after it emerged and measure how much it has shifted travel patterns and spending in grocery stores.

Since the start of trade tensions with the United States, the Buy Canadian sentiment has been heard repeatedly in anecdotes and survey responses about consumer habits. But has it shown up in spending data?

The short answer is yes. We look at two datasets—one on travel patterns and another on grocery store spending. We see that Canadians have increased their spending on domestic travel and on grocery products from Canadian companies and have reduced their spending on similar US products and services.

Canadian travel patterns have significantly shifted

One way we track the impact of the Buy Canadian movement is by looking at travel and tourism data. Historically, given its proximity, the United States has been one of the most popular travel destinations for Canadians. However, since the trade tensions began, travel to the United States has declined significantly—particularly for land-based travel (Chart 1).

Canadians took close to 10 million fewer trips to the United States in 2025 than in 2024—a drop of 25%. Comprising most of this drop were 8.4 million fewer trips to the United States by land and 1.2 million fewer trips by air—or declines of 30% and 12%, respectively. These are the largest year-over-year percentage decreases outside those of the COVID‑19 pandemic, when cross-border travel was essentially closed.

Canadians have instead been travelling within Canada and to international destinations other than the United States. Data from Statistics Canada show that Canadians took 4% more trips domestically and spent about 10% more in Canada on travel and tourism between the first and third quarters of 2025 than in the same period in 2024. Notably, domestic trips and expenditures surged in the second quarter of 2025—with year-over-year increases of 11% and 15%, respectively—as the Buy Canadian movement gained momentum.

Consumers are buying Canadian at the grocery store

Although measuring changes in travel habits is relatively straightforward, assessing whether consumers have shifted their preferences toward Canadian products is more difficult. Most of what we know comes from consumers’ self-reported behaviour or statements from retailers rather than actual spending data, which are more difficult to find.

To address this gap, we use detailed transaction-level data from the NielsenIQ Homescan Consumer Panel. Each month, about 10,000 Canadian households in the panel record their purchases by scanning the barcodes of their purchased items, typically after returning from the store. Food makes up three-quarters of all spending in this dataset.

We take the barcodes in the dataset and link them to a database maintained by GS1, the official global registry for product codes. The GS1 data show the country where the product was licensed, not necessarily where the product was made. Recognizing this limitation, we use the licensing country as a practical (though imperfect) way to infer each product’s origin. We then classify products into three groups based on country: Canada, the United States and other.

Our results show that households have indeed shifted their food spending away from US products and toward Canadian ones. The shift is modest but clearly visible. In March 2025—as trade tensions escalated—the proportion of food spending on Canadian products went up by approximately 2 percentage points relative to January 2025, while the proportion spent on US products fell by a similar amount (Chart 2). And what started in March wasn’t short-lived—it persisted through the summer.

The shift in spending away from US products was larger in some categories—notably coffee and fruit juices. However, an important caveat here is that changes in spending patterns could also reflect the effects of counter-tariffs that Canada imposed on some US food products, such as orange juice. These counter-tariffs led to price increases and may have prompted consumers to look for cheaper alternatives.

Outside of food, where Canadian substitutes are often harder to find, we see no comparable shift in spending patterns.

Buy Canadian remains strong

The most recent results from the Bank of Canada’s Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations show that respondents maintained a strong preference to buy Canadian goods and services in the fourth quarter of 2025 (Chart 3). For example, more than one-third of respondents said they plan to increase their spending on domestic travel, and almost half said they will be reducing their spending on travel to US destinations.

Trade tensions with the United States are causing structural changes in the Canadian economy. Global supply chains and domestic production lines are being reconfigured, and exporters are finding new partnerships. Should Canadian consumers continue to prefer domestic products over US goods and services, this spending shift could not only affect the composition of Canada’s gross domestic product but also have an impact on inflationary pressures. These are good reasons to monitor consumer spending patterns to understand how the Buy Canadian movement might continue to impact the economy.

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