Key Takeaways
- International arrivals to Canada totalled 4.9 million in October 2026, up 4.2% from a year earlier.
- U.S. residents made 1,537,039 trips to Canada, up 8.1% — a ninth straight month of growth.
- Canadians' return trips from the U.S. grew 3.0%, but car trips remain 29.0% below October 2024.
Travel to Canada is growing again. The cross-border car trip is not back.
International arrivals to Canada reached 4.9 million in October 2026, up 4.2% from a year earlier, Statistics Canada reported Thursday in its early leading indicator of travel.
Visitors are coming. U.S. residents made 1,537,039 trips to Canada in October, up 8.1% year over year — the ninth straight month of growth — with about 1.1 million arriving by car and 414,400 by air. Trips by overseas residents rose 5.0% to 465,296.
Canadians are flying home from the U.S. more — and driving much less than in 2024
Canadian residents made 1,880,915 return trips from the United States by air and car combined, up 3.0% from October 2025 — a seventh straight month of growth. Return trips from overseas rose 0.5% to 968,528.
But measured against October 2024, the picture flips. Canadians' return car trips from the U.S. are still down 29.0%, and return air trips are down 19.6%. The border shopping run and the cross-border drive have not recovered, even as flying has started to climb again.
The busiest return day of the month was Thanksgiving Monday, Oct 12, with 172,900 arrivals; the quietest was Oct 28, with 66,700.
StatCan stresses these are preliminary leading-indicator numbers from its Frontier Counts program, not the final travel counts, which come later.
The Twikup Take
Americans are coming north in growing numbers while Canadians keep their cars parked at home. Two years into the cross-border chill, the pattern is settling in: the U.S. trip Canadians still take is the flight they planned — the drive they used to take on a whim is the one that disappeared.
Image: Illustrative image.