A friendly crossing became a political weapon and Vermont paid cash on the nail.
Customs and Border Protection counted 98,000 car crossings into Vermont in April 2025, down from 147,000 a year earlier, roughly a 33% drop. The cash flow slowed, Quebec plates thinned, and innkeepers started doing math they didn’t like.
Here is what changed, and when. On February 1, the President signed Executive Order 14193 and used IEEPA to slap a 25% tariff on most Canadian imports. On February 3 the White House announced a short pause. On March 4 the duties hit.
On July 31, a second order lifted tariffs to 35% effective August 1, wrapped in a fentanyl framing. Ottawa answered with counter tariffs and a blunt call for Canadians to boycott travel and goods. The language from Washington did the rest.
Jokes about a 51st state and a Canadian prime minister recast as a governor were not jokes to the people on the other side. They heard contempt.
→ The White House fact sheet is the receipt for the duty escalation and the drug pretext.
IEEPA lets a president declare an emergency and move money and markets without a trade negotiation. Security language turns punishment into virtue. A weak Canadian dollar near 1.43 per US dollar makes a Burlington weekend feel like a luxury, not a habit. Canada’s own tariffs make cross river shopping less attractive. The earlier border drama around Roxham Road and the Safe Third Country fix primed people to expect hassles at ports of entry.
Tariffs plus taunts plus fear shifted a porous line into a filter, and Canadians voted with their feet. The outcome was visible in the Kingdom and in Burlington.
Kingdom Trails and Jay Peak lost Canadians who normally fill rooms, buy passes, and eat well. Burlington shop owners lost repeat buyers who called to say they loved the place but would not cross while the political climate was toxic.
One small business owner told a reporter that 3 cancellations from regulars in a single day erased $4,000 in expected revenue. Jay Peak managers called longtime Quebec pass holders and heard a pattern. The insult was the deal breaker. The comment threads echoed it.
The boycott was not just about price, it was about pride, and pride is sticky. The steelman defense says the fentanyl crisis is real and allies who do not help should feel pressure even if ski towns suffer. The record from the season undercuts that line. The boycott effect was faster and broader than any targeted pressure on smugglers. The pain hit border communities first and hardest, far from cartel labs and far from the people who write the press releases.
Local officials did not wait for better manners from the podium. Burlington recast Church Street as Rue Canada and pushed a passport of coupons to lure Quebec shoppers. Mayors met their counterparts across the line and said the quiet thing out loud. We value you. Please come back.
At the state level, Treasurer Mike Pieciak built a Task Force on the Federal Transition to map federal policy risk and triage damage in real time. It read like a manual for governing during a food fight. When Washington lights the match, small states end up doing emergency diplomacy while trying to keep the tax receipts from collapsing.
So what follows... Winter. If the boycott mindset holds, pass sales stay soft and hotel tax receipts stay thin. If the administration walks back the July tariff hike and drops the annexation shtick, some good will returns.