A new research tool that tracks cell phone activity has found a 42% drop in visitors from Canada to big metropolitan areas in the US that is much higher than official border-crossing data, suggesting Canadians during the second Trump administration are avoiding US cities in particular.
Researchers from the University of Toronto said the tool showed a “year-over-year median decline of approximately 42% in Canadian visits to US metropolitan areas – significantly higher than official border-crossing data, which showed a roughly 25% decline”.
Methodology
The data comes from geolocation based trips tracking Canadian devices traveling to U.S. metro areas based on Cuebiq’s stops table. A “Canadian device” is defined as a unique device per day in the stops table with the country code set as “Canada” and the device type as “Home.” Home devices are classified based on the duration and timing of the stops from an observation of the past 84 days, and each device is assigned a unique anonymized identifier. These Canadian devices have been recorded between April 1, 2024 - March 31, 2026 to measure daily trip occurrences.
Interesting data but rather disconcerting that Canadians’ and Americans’ cellular devices are being tracked by ad agencies like this.
I thought the same when I first read that. Makes our puny attempts at privacy pretty much irrelevant.