In Florida alone, around half a million Canadians own property, from houses and condos to RV sites People walk along the beach in Surfside, Fla. in December, 2024.Lynne Sladky/The Associated Press
Prior Smith is the host of Canada Calling, a radio show based in Lakefield, Ont., that broadcasts winter-season Canadian news and commentary to Florida, the U.S. Sunbelt and beyond.
Way back in the early 1950s, Toronto CBC radio broadcaster Dave Price came up with a really good idea.
As the story goes, he and several friends were sitting on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., soaking up the sun in late winter while watching spring training for the Toronto Maple Leafs (the Triple-A International League baseball team that moved to Louisville, Ky., in 1967, not the National Hockey League squad whose most recent Stanley Cup win came that same year.) They were trying, without success, to get the results of the previous night’s Maple Leafs game (the aforementioned hockey team) when one of the guys in the group turned to Dave. “You’re in the radio business,” his friend said. “Put a show on down here…the place is wall-to-wall with Canadians.” And so, on Jan. 4, 1954, he did just that, launching a daily winter-season program called Canada Calling.
Over the years, the numbers of Canadians who winter in Florida kept growing and growing. Mr. Price expanded his broadcast coverage throughout the state to the point that the show could be heard daily in every traditional destination for Canadian travellers, from Panama City Beach and Key West to Vero Beach and Tampa Bay.
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I came onto the scene in 1977, and the Canada Calling tradition hasn’t missed a day (with the exception of the 2020-21 winter of COVID-19) in 71 years.
As the host of the daily show for 48 winter seasons, I’ve had a ringside seat to the Canadian winter-visitor market. As Dave Price learned back in the early 50s, it didn’t take me long to figure out that one of the biggest Canadian radio markets each day of each winter isn’t in Canada – it’s in Florida!
Travel numbers vary from year to year. An estimated 3.2 million Canadians spent time in Florida in 2024, and reportedly infused more than US$6-billion into the Florida economy. Even though visits from Canadians represent only about two per cent of the state’s annual tourist business, we’re still a big deal in Florida and in other traditional vacation spots “down south”: in places like South Carolina, Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona, and Southern California, Canadians add hundreds of thousands of visits to that total and billions more in revenue to the U.S. economy.
In Florida alone, around half a million Canadians own property, from houses and condos to RV sites. In fact, when it comes to foreign buyers of Florida real estate, we’ve been number one for years! We buy even though it’s an expensive undertaking, given the increased costs of just about everything in recent years including property insurance (if you can even get it in the wake of one costly and devastating storm after another) and condo maintenance fees that have surged since the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South building in the Miami suburb of Surfside four years ago. Then, there’s that’s nagging 70-cent-Canadian-dollar thing, even if tough conversion rates didn’t seem to hold Canadians back before, when there was an opportunity to get away from nasty weather for a few days or weeks. Florida may have been a cheap place to visit for years, but no longer.
And while Florida has been welcoming, you now need to capably stickhandle around the political reality of the Donald Trump-Ron DeSantis ecosystem. The Florida Governor even recently mocked Canadians and their boycott – though he cited a report that predated the trade war. “Maybe they wanted to get a glimpse of what a Stanley Cup-winning hockey team actually looks like,” he said.
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For a long time, Canadians’ southward travel has been taken for granted, and Florida has done little in the scheme of things to attract our business. As the state’s tourism marketing director once told me, “When the weather gets lousy up there they’ll be here…we just leave the door open.” Many Floridians I’ve encountered have no clue about anything related to Canada. It’s nothing personal – we’re simply not on their radar. From their perspective, it’s just good news that year after year we keep showing up by the millions, leaving behind billions, and returning home come mid-April.
But this March, I started hearing something I’ve never heard before: one Canadian after another cancelling their plans for a trip south in response to Mr. Trump’s annoying and repeated “51st state” rhetoric, his ridicule of Canada’s former prime minister, and his threats to Canada’s economy. Many who were already down south were packing up and leaving early, and others still were putting their properties up for sale, only to discover it’s not exactly a seller’s market right now.
We’re in the middle of the summer now. It’s the time when Canadians start thinking about making winter travel, lease and rental arrangements. But trying to figure out what the White House and an erratic President are going to do next is a mug’s game. Given all that’s unfolded in terms of Canada-U.S. relations over the past six months, travel to and from the U.S. has declined. The Buy Canadian movement and travel within Canada are all the rage. Canadian airlines are reading the tea leaves and easing back their schedules to the southern U.S. while boosting frequency to warm-weather destinations in other countries.
It’s not clear yet whether we’re in this for the long haul. Will thousands of Canadians continue to leave their properties sitting empty or in a rental pool as a matter of principle? Will Canadians’ RVs stay here, parked all winter, at significant cost to them? Will “mean and nasty” Canadians (as Mr. Trump described us in July) abruptly change what they’ve been doing for decades and pass up the seasonal relationships they’ve had with American friends? Will the billions in Canadian tourist dollars normally spent in the southern U.S. each winter go somewhere else?
I suspect we’ll know the answers to those questions soon. Winter is coming.
