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. Starting with September, Statistics Canada began 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.
Adding travellers who were previously left out would, if anything, be expected to raise this year’s counts. That makes the Fort Erie decline more striking.
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. The NEXUS change could also affect each crossing differently. 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 asked the Peace Bridge Authority and 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.
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