By Staff Reporter
FORT ERIE, Ont. — Canadians are slowly starting to drive south again. Just not across the Peace Bridge.
Statistics Canada said this week that Canadian residents made 5.6% more return trips by car from the United States in September than a year earlier, the sixth straight month of year-over-year growth for car and air trips combined. But a Buffalo Chronicle analysis of the agency’s daily border data shows the Fort Erie crossing at the Canadian end of the Peace Bridge went the other way. Canadian-resident car trips there fell again.
What the numbers show
Using Statistics Canada’s leading-indicator table of land arrivals, The Buffalo Chronicle added up daily counts of Canadian residents returning home by automobile in September of 2024, 2025 and 2026. The same method reproduces the agency’s national figures exactly: up 5.6% from last September, and down 31.1% from September 2024.
At Fort Erie, about 104,000 Canadian residents came home by car this September. That is down 2.1% from September 2025 and 35.5% below September 2024, when the count was about 161,300. Same-day trips, the cross-border shopping, dining and game-day runs that Buffalo businesses rely on most, fell faster: down 7.6% from a year ago and 37.8% from two years ago.
The other two Niagara bridges recovered some ground. Canadian car trips through the Rainbow Bridge rose 14.2% from last year, though they remain about 40% below 2024. The Lewiston-Queenston Bridge rose 29.5% and is now about 11% below 2024. Across all three Niagara crossings, Canadian car trips were up about 12% from last year but still about 29% below September 2024.
Traffic heading the other way is booming. American residents entering Canada by car through Fort Erie rose 13.6% from last September, matching their 2024 level. Nationally, U.S.-resident car trips to Canada rose 19.5%, although Statistics Canada said part of that jump reflects Labour Day falling a week later this year.
A caution on the data
The figures carry an important caveat. Statistics Canada has begun folding travellers who cross in NEXUS lanes into its counts, and it told users “to exercise caution when comparing data for the September 2026 reference month and onwards with previous years.” The numbers are also preliminary. Complete counts are due Nov. 23.
That change has not yet reached the Niagara crossings. The integration of NEXUS Highway data into the leading indicator “started in August 2026,” Statistics Canada said in an email to The Buffalo Chronicle, and so far it has been added at only one port: Lansdowne, Ont., at the Thousand Islands Bridge to Alexandria Bay, N.Y., which the agency called “a comparatively smaller port in Ontario, traffic-wise.”
“Fort Erie and the other border crossings in the Niagara region have not yet been integrated as of September 2026,” the agency said. “Other ports of entry, including Fort Erie, Queenston and Rainbow Bridge, are scheduled to be integrated by January 2027; however, this is dependent on operational considerations from the Canada Border Services Agency.”
That means the preliminary Niagara figures still leave out NEXUS travellers, and the gap can be large. The difference between the leading indicator and the complete counts “varies by port depending on the prevalence of Nexus use,” Statistics Canada said. In July, the agency said, the leading indicator counted 124,483 Canadian residents returning by car through Fort Erie, while the complete count was 153,104, or 23% higher. At the Queenston Bridge, the complete count of 130,499 was 8.9% above the preliminary 119,786. At the Rainbow Bridge, the two were nearly identical: 63,941 and 63,988.
That cuts two ways. Because NEXUS travellers were left out of the Fort Erie leading-indicator counts in all three years, the change Statistics Canada flagged does not explain the bridge’s year-over-year decline. But the preliminary figures understate how many Canadians actually cross at Fort Erie, likely by more than at the other Niagara bridges, and this September’s numbers could be revised upward when the complete counts are released. Whether the decline holds up in those counts may depend on how NEXUS use at Fort Erie has changed over the past two years.
The bridge authority’s view
Thomas A. Boyle, chief executive officer of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority, which operates the Peace Bridge, challenged the picture drawn from the Statistics Canada figures in an email to The Buffalo Chronicle after this story was published. He questioned whether the StatCan data “reflect the number of people processed or the number of vehicles processed.”
“The Peace Bridge Authority, like other bridge and tunnel operators, records crossings by vehicle class: passenger cars, trucks, and buses,” Mr. Boyle said. “For example, an automobile carrying four passengers might be recorded as four people by Statistics Canada but would register as one automobile in the bridge operator’s data.” He added that bridge and tunnel operators “do not track crossings by the country of origin of license plates; from an operational perspective, a car is a car.”
“I would caution that percentages without supporting data do not always tell the complete story,” he said.
Mr. Boyle pointed instead to passenger-vehicle counts that the region’s bridge operators report through the Bridge and Tunnel Operators Association. Comparing January through September of each year, he said, total passenger-vehicle volumes on the Niagara Region’s four bridges “declined by 16.2% from 2024 to 2025, before rebounding by 4.2% from 2025 to 2026.” By his figures, regional volumes this year “remain 12.7% below 2024 levels.” The declines of 30% to 37% cited in this story, he said, “are considerably steeper than the declines reflected in actual passenger vehicle crossing data presented.”
He said the Peace Bridge carries about 44% of the region’s passenger-vehicle traffic, followed by the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge at 28%, the Rainbow Bridge at 23% and the NEXUS-only Whirlpool Bridge at 5%, and that its share “has increased slightly between 2024 and 2026 (not decreased).” In 2025, he said, the Peace Bridge “experienced the smallest percentage decline in passenger vehicle volumes compared with 2024 among the four regional crossings.” He said the Rainbow Bridge has been hit harder, consistent with its “greater reliance on tourism-related traffic.”
“We anticipate that the trends experienced over the past year and a half will likely continue in the short term,” Mr. Boyle said. “Nevertheless, we remain optimistic that cross-border traffic volumes will recover over the longer term.”
The two sets of numbers measure different things. Statistics Canada counts travellers, not vehicles, and The Buffalo Chronicle’s analysis covered only Canadian residents returning home by car in September. The bridge operators’ figures count passenger vehicles crossing in both directions, regardless of where their occupants live, over the first nine months of the year.
What tourism officials are saying
Buffalo’s tourism agency has spent much of the year trying to win Canadians back. Visit Buffalo has bought billboards on the Gardiner Expressway, Highway 427 and the Canadian side of the Peace Bridge that read, “O Canada, We’re Still Singing It, Love Buffalo.”
“This is just saying, Canadians, we’re ready whenever you’re ready to come across the border again,” Visit Buffalo President and CEO Patrick Kaler told WKBW last month. He said the message “isn’t about being transactional.” He added that Canada “has always been a great market for visitation into our community, especially for day trips.”
Visit Buffalo has also hedged its bets. “For the first time in our organization’s history, we have a sustained advertising campaign in direct flight markets like Boston and Philadelphia and Washington, DC,” Visit Buffalo spokesman Brian Hayden told Spectrum News in September.
In Niagara County, operators say the problem is not only politics. “The numbers didn’t speak well for Canadians coming over,” said John Kinney, president of Whirlpool Jet Boat Tours, in the same Spectrum report. “That wasn’t happening because of political rhetoric. It was not happening because of difficulties with long lineups at the border and all of those challenges.”
Spectrum, citing Tourism Economics, reported that Canadian spending in New York fell by $480 million in 2025 and that visitor spending in Niagara County dropped 5%.
The Buffalo Niagara Partnership has pointed to the same forces. “Due to a weak Canadian dollar, tariffs, and hostile negotiations between our nations this year, we have seen a sharp decrease in Canadian traffic,” Josh Veronica, the partnership’s director of government affairs, told The Record, Buffalo State’s student newspaper, earlier this year.
Why Fort Erie?
The data do not explain why the Peace Bridge is lagging while the Niagara Falls bridges recover. Possible factors include wait times and the different mix of travellers each bridge serves. Heavier NEXUS use at Fort Erie, which the preliminary counts do not yet capture, could also be a factor. Those are questions for the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority, which runs the bridge and keeps its own traffic counts, and for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which staffs the American plaza.
The stakes are clearest for Buffalo’s day-trip economy. Spectrum reported that Erie County’s tourism numbers are up overall, which Visit Buffalo partly credits to its new U.S. ad campaign. But the businesses that once counted on a steady flow of Ontario plates, like the Elmwood Avenue bar owner who told The Record he had seen fewer Canadian customers, are still waiting for the turnaround that other border crossings are starting to see.
Statistics Canada will publish its October estimate on Nov. 12. The Buffalo Chronicle has also asked Visit Buffalo Niagara about the Fort Erie figures and will update this story with any response.
Featured photo: The Peace Bridge between Buffalo and Fort Erie, Ont. Photo by Ken Lund via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.
Updated October 20, 2026: This story was updated to include comment from Thomas A. Boyle, chief executive officer of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority.
Updated October 22, 2026: This story was updated to include comment from Statistics Canada and correct when and where NEXUS data was integrated.
.jpg){kind=link}
Leave a Reply