Canadian travel slump squeezes border businesses

Deb Weigel is 71 years old, and she said lately, she’s been feeling like a young newlywed again.

But not in a good way.

“We’re back to trying to make ends meet, like we’re just starting out right now,” she said.

She’s the manager of Corner Parcel in Pembina, a town of 500 in the northeast corner of North Dakota, right on the border with Minnesota and Canada.

The shop caters exclusively to Canadians, helping them avoid international shipping costs by acting as their U.S. address. It’s one of many in Pembina.

The business model depends on Canadians crossing the border, but fewer of them are. Many say they’re feeling cold about America because of President Trump’s tariffs and rhetoric about annexing Canada.

The number of passengers crossing the Pembina border was down by nearly 35 percent in 2025 compared to 2024, according to data from the Bureau of Transportation.

Weigel’s shop has been hit hard. She said they’re getting less than half of the packages they used to and have cut their staff significantly, down from at least six workers a shift to just one.

For Weigel, the drop in business means no bonuses or raises, which is particularly tough because her husband’s income also relies on Canadian traffic — or rather, as a Canadian truck driver, he’s part of it.

“He [works] as much as he can, but there’s a lot of … sit and wait, because there’s no loads,” she said. “It’s hard. We’re having a very hard time making ends meet, and I’m too old for that.”

She’s unable to retire, she said. It would be too much of a strain on her husband.

“It makes me glad that my kids are all grown and gone in that aspect, because I don’t know how these young parents can raise children anymore,” she said. “We don’t go anywhere, and we don’t do anything, we just do what we have to, day to day, so I don’t know how people are surviving.”

Border business blues

The parcel business has been particularly affected, but other border town businesses said they’re feeling it too.. Pembina’s grocery store, D & K Grocery, has been owned by Deanna Hager and her husband for more than 20 years.

Canadians would frequently cross the border to buy food that’s expensive or hard to get back home. But now, business is down by 15 percent because of a decline in Canadian customers, she said.

“We used to have our regulars that would come two, three times a week from Canada, and now they don’t,” she said.

Like Weigel, Hager said the downturn has started to have an impact on her finances.

“There’s things we don’t do that we used to do, you know,” she said. “Just travel here or there, you just got to mind your Ps and Qs till things start picking up again.”

The story is similar in Lancaster, Minn., a small town just 25 miles east of Pembina. The border crossing there gets much less traffic, but still, local businesses said they’re feeling the cold shoulder from their northern neighbors.

“A lot of people are not coming down anymore,” said Shannon Langerud, who has owned the town’s grocery store, J & S Foods, with her husband since 2019.

The decline in Lancaster seems to be multi-faceted. Lake Bronson is nearby and is usually a tourist attraction for Canadians, but it’s been closed since 2024 as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources replaces its dam.

Some Canadians also said the weakening of the Canadian dollar makes it too expensive to travel.

“I just wish that we would get it just figured out (and) go back to the way it used to be,” Langerud said. “Our small town communities are hurting a lot right now with everything that’s going on in the world.”

In every county with a rural point of entry, jobs in the retail sector and the leisure and hospitality sector were down last year, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

It’s impossible to determine how much of the decline in tourism-dependent jobs is tied to fewer international travelers, said Anthony Schaffhauser, the department’s regional analyst for northwest Minnesota. But, he added, “I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t help.”

It could also be due to factors that make people spend less generally, including high inflation.

“People drop off their spending if they’re strapped for cash,” he said. “We don’t have any way to separate out just how much of that would be from U.S. consumers cutting back, and how much of that is from fewer international travelers,” he said.

Downstream damage

While some Canadians may stop in border towns for snacks or a parcel, many keep driving south to spend time and money in other parts of the region, and those areas may be getting caught in the crossfire too.

“There’s a lot of Canadian visitors that come to shop in the US,” Schaffhauser said. “Some of the more urban areas and centers — that would affect the retail trade in those areas”

For example, many Canadians travel to shop in the Grand Forks metro area. It’s about 80 miles south of the border.

Pat Boppre owns the Blue Moose Cafe in East Grand Forks, Minn. He said the restaurant used to attract about 400 Canadians every weekend.

“The last two years are probably down about six to 10 percent of traffic, just from Canadian traffic,” he said.

He said it’s a relatively small portion of the business, but still, the decline means they’ve had to cut hours.

“With the downturn in business, obviously, the money isn’t coming in, so you do have to cut some certain things,” he said.

But the data is a bit brighter heading into summer, which is typically when border crossings peak. The number of personal vehicle passengers driving into Minnesota from Canada in March, April and May was higher than last year, but still below what they were in 2024. Boppre said he’s feeling it.

“It’s kind of starting to turn around at this point,” he added. “We’re starting to see this summer, we’ve probably seen the most Canadians that we’ve seen in the last two.”

In Pembina, things are slowly turning around too. Border crossings in April and May were higher in 2026 than 2025.

Deb Weigel, the manager of Corner Parcel, is more at the mercy of the border than many. She said she’s encouraged by the uptick in crossings and customers.

“I’m a very firm believer [that] neither country can survive without the other one,” she said.