Mike Sardina can measure the cost of U.S. foreign policy with his ears.
“Yeah, the sound of not having French being spoken,” Sardina said from behind the bar at Parker Pie, in Glover, on a recent sunny afternoon.
The popular pizza restaurant in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom relies heavily on Québécois tourists who’ve enjoyed slices, pints — and poutines made with cheese curds from a nearby farm.
The ambiance, Sardina said, has been sadly monolingual this summer.
“It’s just a different type of buzz in the air when those folks are here,” he said. “That is palpably not here this summer.”
Neither is the cash those Canadian patrons would pump into the local economy. Anne Eldridge, who’s owned Parker Pie since 2019, said revenues at the restaurant are down by about 20% compared to last year. She doesn’t have the hard data to prove it, but Eldridge figures the vast majority of that decline is due to fewer visitors crossing the northern border.
“Restaurants have very thin margins as it is, so the effects of economic upheaval and international drama, for lack of a better word, it really affects the bottom line,” said the Glover resident.
Data compiled by the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development supports Eldridge’s intuition. The number of passenger vehicles crossing from Canada into Vermont over the past six months is down by 26%. The amount of spending transacted on Canadian credit cards dropped 44% over the same time period.
My basic observation is that this is as bad as we feared it would be.Newport City Mayor Rick Ufford-Chase
Newport Mayor Rick Ufford-Chase said the effect of Canadians’ sudden withdrawal from northern Vermont has been visible in the city’s downtown.
“My basic observation is that this is as bad as we feared it would be,” Ufford-Chase said. “I suspect that our numbers on Main Street are down by roughly 35% or 40%, because so much of our summer business in the past has come from our Canadian colleagues.”
The Newport mayor said the words he most often uses to describe his city to outsiders are “resilience and grit.”
“But it’s not an easy time to be a small businessperson anywhere. It’s especially hard here in the northern part of Vermont. And it’s remarkably hard in the wake of the president’s — I don’t what else to call it — lunacy,” he said.
President Donald Trump’s foreign policy agenda has had significant implications for Vermont’s relationship with its largest international trade partner. His recent decision to increase tariffs on most goods from Canada, from 25% to 35%, could threaten longstanding business relationships between Vermont businesses and Canadian manufacturers and suppliers.
But Kingdom residents say it’s Trump’s challenge to Canada’s sovereignty, and his suggestion that the country become the U.S.’s “51st state” that has done the most damage to Vermont’s tourism economy.
“We would see dozens and dozens of bikes outside the store on the bike racks or just leaning up against the building, and normally hearing them speaking French, and that is just not happening,” said Rick Woodward, who owns Green Mountain Natural Foods in Newport.
Woodward said revenues at his store are down 20% this summer.
“I would be comfortable in saying the vast majority of that is Canadian traffic,” he said. “We’re not seeing those faces that we’ve come to know. And we’re not hearing much French.”
Statewide, Canadians account for 5% of Vermont’s $4 billion annual tourism economy. According to state officials, that percentage jumps to as high as 30% or 35% for communities in northern Vermont, where some of Quebec’s Eastern Townships are less than a half hour drive away.
The local folks will complain that there’s too much traffic. But traffic means money.Jethro Hayman, president, Barton Area Chamber of Commerce
Jethro Hayman, the president of the Barton Area Chamber of Commerce, said the Kingdom sometimes has a complicated relationship with outsiders who come to enjoy its natural attributes such as Lake Willoughby or Mount Pisgah.
“The local folks will complain that there’s too much traffic. But traffic means money. And if you don’t want dire poverty, then this is sort of the bargain that we have to make,” said Hayman, who lives in Glover. “We don’t have enough manufacturing to keep things going. Obviously agriculture has transformed, so there’s not as much of that, so a huge part of the equation is tourism.”
Locals are doing their best to stem the tide. Ufford-Chase is executive director of Newport City Downtown Development, which created a special bumper sticker that reads, “Canada — en vous respect.”
“Just to make it clear we are not part of this lashing out that the president has engaged in,” he said.
And at the state level, Tourism Commissioner Heather Pelham said her department is working with an advertising firm to develop focus-group tested messaging campaigns that will begin appearing in Canadian markets later this month.
But prospects of reversing the 2025 summer tourism slump are slim.
Ufford-Chase is under no illusion that coming up with new slogans, or flying Canadian flags, or renaming streets in French, will soften the anti-American sentiment that’s fueled the drop in traffic. He said he learned that firsthand when he met with the mayors of the Quebec townships of Magog and Stanstead earlier this summer.
“They made it clear that until there’s some kind of clear sign of reconciliation or respect … there’s just no way that we’re going to push back against the anti-U.S. tide that exists right now,” he said.
