If there’s one place you’d think Canadians wouldn’t get cold feet, it would be Arizona.
For decades, Canadian visitors, snowbirds and migrants have made this state their sunshiny home away from the winter cold, establishing beachheads from Scottsdale to Green Valley to the RV parks and golf resorts dotting Tucson’s metro area.
Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller
Some no longer are feeling Arizona’s warm welcome, though. It’s nothing personal to us — it’s just that the U.S. president has imposed 25% tariffs on Canada, before repealing some of them, and repeatedly declared that he wants to take over Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state.
At first, the threats seemed like a joke, but now Canadians are taking it seriously. And some in Arizona’s sizable collection of Canadians take strong umbrage at that. Others, visitors who love to travel to Arizona in the winter, are simply changing their plans as part of a broader boycott of the United States, its products and services.
One Canadian resident of Tucson, Valerie Jewison, told me she and her husband sold the mobile home they’ve wintered in for 13 years last week because of President Trump’s threats.
“When Trump got elected and started saying he was going to take over Canada or economically devastate us, I thought I can’t spend any time down here. I can’t just contribute to the economy.”
Jewison said she and her husband love the community at Far Horizons RV Resort on the east side, but the little bubble they lived in could no longer keep the outside world out once the American president threatened the existence of Canada.
“I really felt betrayed. It hurt me to my core what he was saying about Canada,” she said.
So she and her husband priced their park-model mobile home — one that has the wheels removed and is decked in — to sell and cut a deal last week.
A Canadian resident of Green Valley, Jim Groundwater, told me he and his wife are taking the first steps toward selling their house because of the conflict. They probably would have done so in the next few years anyway, Groundwater said, but they’re accelerating the plan because of the hostility Trump has directed toward Canada.
“We like it here. We’ve been coming down for 20 years,” Groundwater said. “I’m concerned about whether we as non-Americans will have a place here to feel comfortable.”
Tucson and Arizona tourism officials are working to minimize the impact. The Arizona Office of Tourism says that in the last year for which data is available, 2023, there were 822,500 visits by Canadian citizens spending at least one night in Arizona.
That statistic counts just visits of 30 days or less, though. The Canadian consulate general in Los Angeles, which covers Arizona, reports that there are more than 100,000 snowbirds in the state as well.
“We’re hearing a lot from clients’ representatives in Canada,” said Felipe Garcia, president and CEO of Visit Tucson. “There’s not a strong desire to travel to the United States at this moment.”
In fact, an early-February poll of Canadians found that 48% were less likely to travel to the United States in 2025. That was before the conflict really heated up with the imposition of tariffs last week, after which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters, “What he (Trump) wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
As boycotts of American goods have spread in Canada, government-owned liquor stores in the most populous province, Ontario, have removed American whiskey, wine and other products from their shelves. In British Columbia, the provincial liquor stores are only removing products from states that voted for Trump, like Arizona.
Garcia said there’s stress in the formally friendly relationship that Visit Tucson is trying to address.
“We’ve shifted from traditional marketing to public relations and damage control,” he said.
They sent communications manager Mo Olivas on a five-day trip in late February to meet with travel journalists in Toronto and Vancouver, British Columbia. She accompanied the Arizona Office of Tourism’s media relations manager, Marjorie Magnusson.
“The goal really was just to maintain that friendship and an open line of communication with the Canadian journalists,” said Olivas, whose jobs include pitching stories about Tucson to travel writers around the world. “The feeling that we got from the journalists was that it’s going to be divided.”
“We won’t know for a couple of years the true impact.”
I asked people on Facebook, including a group of Canadian expatriates in Arizona, what they are seeing, hearing or experiencing. A half-dozen people told me about Canadians who have canceled trips to see them in Arizona, and several, like Groundwater, spoke of selling their own Arizona homes.
“My own family won’t come and visit me now,” Taben Hale of Phoenix said. “I don’t blame them.”
Rivka Benoit of Tucson said, “My group of 8 Canadians friends usually spend a month in Florida & a month in Arizona. They canceled all that this year (flight & housing) and were able to book in Mexico.”
Others pointed out that a weakening Canadian dollar also makes travel to the U.S. more costly. And there is a clear political divide, with some conservative Canadians blaming Trudeau for the conflict. Other said that all the proclamations of boycotting travel here are more talk than action, and Canadians will come anyway.
Indeed, Allyn Mancuso, manager of Cactus Country RV Resort on the far southeast side, said Canadians own “quite a few” mobile homes in the park, but he hasn’t seen any boycotts or related issues crop up.
“This year, with this political climate, I’m not experiencing that sort of thing,” he said.
But it’s happening on a grassroots level. Kiki Moore, a longtime Tucsonan who is a dual citizen of the two countries, told me two groups of visitors from the province where she lives seven months out of the year, Newfoundland, have canceled visits for political reasons.
“They decided they want no part of the United States,” she said. Moore is worried, she said, that we’re “making enemies that will be hard to get back” as friends.
Arizonans probably had little idea our northern friends would be turned into enemies when we helped vote Trump into office. Now it will cost us — not just in lost revenue from visitors who no longer come, but also in the decades of goodwill suddenly squandered.
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