Good morning. The Globe and Mail sent me on a road trip to South Carolina and Florida to answer the question: Are Canadians still carrying out the time-honoured tradition of a U.S. road trip for March break while President Donald Trump constantly talks about annexation and wages a trade war on our country? And if there is a boycott, will American businesses even take note? More on that below, but first:

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• Sales of American products are “rapidly dropping” in grocery stores, according to the CEO of Sobeys parent Empire Company Ltd.
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• Multiple employers begin layoffs, and Algoma Steel CEO hopes for a federal boost to deal with tariff pressures
• How do businesses calculate the cost of a tariff? Canadian companies are struggling to tally the price that keeps piling up
• Canadians ditch a time-honoured tradition of the Vegas bachelor party, opting to host closer to home
• Why is it so hard to buy Canadian when shopping online? Consumer Affairs reporter Mariya Postelnyak explains

Hi, I’m Salmaan Farooqui, a personal-finance reporter for The Globe. A clear trend started to emerge five days into my spring break road trip from Toronto to Florida.

Canadians were expressing their dismay at the current state of the U.S. government by either selling their holiday homes or leaving their vacation early, but Americans just weren’t noticing the difference.

Along the road, there have been clear signs that Canadians are not travelling the way they used to. Globe photographer Fred Lum and I counted less than 10 cars with Canadian plates in the first couple days of driving.

The dreaded border crossing into America on a holiday weekend took us only five minutes. The U.S. border guard said there were plenty of Canadians (most heading to Florida), but Statistics Canada shows auto crossings are on the decline. In February, there were 1.2 million return trips into Canada by Canadians, a sharp 23-per-cent drop from the same period in 2024.

In Myrtle Beach, S.C., there were plenty of American tourists filling up the boardwalk by the beach and creating traffic on the roads nearby.

But organizations like the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce were concerned, especially since Canadians are an important group of travellers who visit during the spring, an off-peak period. “We’re going an extra step this year to welcome all of our visitors, but especially those from Canada,” said Tracy Conner, president and CEO of the chamber.

When we spoke to individual hotels, they said they didn’t notice a difference from previous years. But Rob DeNure, owner of DeNure Tours, which operates charter bus tours to Myrtle Beach and other U.S. destinations from the Toronto area, certainly felt a change.

He said bookings to U.S. destinations dropped by roughly half since the election, and have almost stopped entirely since the trade war. His company is trying to pivot to provide transportation for more school hockey games and ski trips to make up for lost business to the U.S.

“We feel like we’re back in the pandemic where demand has dropped to just zero.”

In Florida, we went to a Blue Jays spring-training game in Dunedin, to try and decipher whether Canadians are still supporting their only team while they play in Florida before the regular season. The stands looked fairly packed, but average attendance at spring-training games so far has dropped by roughly 900 people per game compared with last year. That’s a 13-per-cent drop.

Folks like Rachel Deveau were self-conscious about coming here, although she and her partner decided to come anyway because they booked in September and stood to lose out financially. They’re having a great time and would love to come back, but they won’t do so until Trump is gone from The White House.

We also met people on the road who had no problems travelling to the U.S. right now.

Dennis Galley and his 10-year-old, Charlotte, from Drayton, Ont., were on their way to Cape Canaveral to watch a rocket launch when we found them at a West Virginia rest stop. He said the current rhetoric about avoiding the U.S. didn’t matter to him, but he has always tried to “buy Canadian,” even before Trump’s return to office.

“My parents, they’re hardcore ‘buy Canadian’ only, and I get that. I just don’t have as much of a problem with the leadership down here as they do, and I never have,” he said.