Why some Canadian snowbirds still winter down south

Some Canadians will continue spending their winters in the Southern United States, bucking a trend that has seen fewer Canadians heading south of the border. 

Elaine McGivern is a Halifax snowbird who flocks south every November until mid-spring. McGivern and her husband have owned a home in Florida for nearly 20 years, and decided to go back this year despite disagreeing with the U.S. government.

“If we didn’t own a home here, we might think differently,” said McGivern in a phone interview from Florida. “But our community and friends there are great, so we feel OK to keep going.” 

McGivern says no one has judged their decision to keep travelling and spending time in the U.S. 

“Everyone in our life understands, and even if they personally wouldn’t go themselves, they get why we continue to go because a big part of our life is there,” said McGivern.  

Fewer Canadians are travelling to the U.S., with December marking the 12th consecutive month of year-over-year declines. The number of Canadian-resident return trips by automobile from the United States totalled just 1.3 million in December, a 30.7 per cent decline from the same month in 2024.

Travel and personal finance writer Barry Choi believes many factors are behind the drop in travel to the U.S.

“The first thing’s political. There’s a lot of U.S. rhetoric for the president so people want to avoid it for that,” says Choi, whose work appears in the Globe and Mail.

“There’s obviously always a kind of nationalism when this stuff happens. People want to stay close to home but you know for snowbirds, people who already own property down south, obviously it makes sense for them to continue to go down to the U.S. And then at the same time maybe people aren’t spending as much because the exchange rate is completely higher.” 

As of Wednesday, one U.S. dollar is worth $1.38 Cdn. The weaker Canadian dollar makes U.S. travel more expensive for Canadians. 

Other people are tired of boycotting, like Lina Starr from Guelph, Ont., who stopped going to Florida for many years but decided to return this winter after her friends needed help filling their rental spot.

“They’ve had so many cancellations from Canadians in the last couple of years, and so we’re trying to help them out a little bit as well and selfishly to get out of the cold and the snow,” says Starr.

“So we’re sucking it up and going down.”

According to the 2025 Winter Smart Traveller Survey by the Travel Health Insurance Association of Canada, only 26 per cent of Canadians surveyed were likely in 2025 to go to the U.S., a 37 per cent drop from 2024. 

“The general climate down there, as far as the way I’m treated when I go down there, has all been positive,” says Trevor Marsh, a financial advisor from Ontario who owns three long-term rentals and one vacation home in Arizona. 

Marsh has continued to spend time in the U.S. this past year and has no plans to sell his properties there. He has noticed the people renting from him have been “more American.”

“I have had people that I know that have been interested in renting my place, then say no they’re not going, solely because of the new government in place,” says Marsh. “There definitely are some people that are a hard no.”