Automobiles and planes, but not trains: How Canadians have returned home during the pandemic
We don’t keep track of Canadians when they leave the country, but we do count them when they come home and also note how they came home.
We have counted 6.9 million border crossings by Canadians returning home from April 2020 to September 2021, with automobiles and planes being by far the most common modes of transport for those returning from outside of the country.
Approximately three in five (59.2%) of Canadians who have returned home since the onset of the pandemic have done so by automobile from the United States (4.1 million).
Planes were the next most common way to come home (39.8%), with 1.8 million jetting home from overseas, and 930,586 flying home from the United States during this period.
In addition, approximately 0.1% have come home by bus (8,882), and 0.1% have returned by boat from either the United States or overseas (3,960).
No Canadians returned home by train from April 2020 to September 2021, although not that many arrived by train before the pandemic. For example, 0.1% of the Canadian travellers who returned home in 2019 did so by train (41,101).
This was well below the number of Canadians who returned home by bus (843,833) and lower than those who came home on foot (174,185) over the same period.
Finally, since the onset of the pandemic, 44,811 Canadians have come home on foot, with Rainbow Bridge, Niagara Falls, being the most common border crossing to walk across.
Although they were not all necessarily returning home, the one mode of transportation that was least affected by the pandemic falls under the “other” category, which includes the truck drivers and cargo ship and train crews, who kept store shelves stocked during the pandemic, as well as the plane crews and bus drivers that brought Canadians home. Just over 7.5 million “other” travellers have crossed the border into Canada from April 2020 to September 2021, up from 5.6 million in 2019.
Although the number of Canadians returning home from abroad is now rising, it still pales in comparison with those counted before the pandemic. In fact, over twice as many Canadians returned to Canada from abroad during the summer of 2019 (15.3 million from June to August) compared with all that have done so in the year and half since the onset of the pandemic (6.9 million).
Contact information
For more information contact us (toll-free 1-800-263-1136; 514-283-8300; infostats@statcan.gc.ca) or Media Relations (statcan.mediahotline-ligneinfomedias.statcan@statcan.gc.ca).