U.S. President Donald Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state has upset some snowbirds, who are either choosing to migrate further south or stay in Canada year-round.
“Snowbird” refers to Canadians who spend their winters in sunny climates, which include Florida, Arizona, Texas, as well as other sunny U.S. locales. However, following the recent shift in Canadian-U.S. relations, some are choosing to avoid the country altogether.
CTVNews.ca spoke to a series of snowbirds who are avoiding the U.S. These snowbirds responded to a callout asking for viewer input. CTVNews.ca was not able to verify some details shared.
Sharel and Dan Wallis told CTVNews.ca on Friday that they started snowbirding in 2018, but have now sworn off the United States completely.
“We’re always taking our time getting to Texas. We’ve traveled through Arizona. We really enjoyed our time in New Mexico and even in West Texas. We found some really hidden gems, nice places to explore,” said Dan. But now they’re staying in Mexico over the winter, as they no longer felt welcome in the U.S., with both giving a “hard no” to returning for a future vacation.
They said they’ll miss their American friends, but that they “can’t get past how Canada has been treated.”
Now they’re spending summers in Baja California, Mexico, where they say there’s other Canadians, and some Americans. Politics is a prickly subject among the visitors, but Sharel said she feels for her American friends.
“It’s hard to see those people in a country that’s doing what it’s doing. These are kind, giving, generous people. They have a government that has no rules,” she said, adding that she’s “having a hard time matching the people that I know that are Americans to the country they are now living in.”
“How did these people get to that place to have leadership like that?”
‘Didn’t like us Canadians’
Rosie Muzechka told CTV News on Friday in an interview that she’d been going down to Florida for 15 years to escape the true north’s winters but that she recently sold her property.
“Because of the political temperature and the way the administration there is treating Canada, and some bad feelings that are going on with the Americans against Canadians,” she said. “We just decided that it wasn’t worth it.”
Instead, she said that she’s been vacationing in Osoyoos, B.C. She will spend four months there this year and has already rebooked for next year.
“It’s lovely. The weather is great. There’s no snow, it’s not extremely warm, and it’s not Florida, but it’s wonderful,” she said.
Muzechka claims she started to feel less safe living in Florida as tensions between Canada and the U.S. grew, saying Americans who moved into the neighbourhood “didn’t like us Canadians very much.”
She said that the attitudes of her neighbours became more hostile in recent years and that she no longer felt welcome in her community.
‘The U.S. brand is destroyed’
Ed Parg said in a Friday interview with CTV News that his family had vactioned in the U.S. for decades and had considered buying property. He said they would regularly take their children down to the United States for March Break vacations and that he often travelled to the U.S. for work.
“For more than 20 years, my family and I spent our vacations in Florida. We took our children to Disney. We returned year after year. We seriously considered buying property and retiring there,” he said in an email.
As part of his job Parg would travel internationally, and he began to notice how international clients changed their attitudes towards Americans. “U.S. executives openly defending Donald Trump in front of European clients—invoking Hillary Clinton’s emails while ignoring behavior that made the U.S. appear unserious,” Parg wrote in an email to CTV News.
“The U.S. brand is destroyed,” he said in the interview, “and its destroyed for generations.”
He said that he doesn’t think it will recover in his lifetime.
CP24

