Crossing the border is easier than it was during the pandemic, but Canadian business has yet to rebound in Aroostook County.
Americans and Canadians frequently crossed the border before 2020 for work, pleasure, shopping and visiting family. Then the border shut down as COVID-19 raged.
Both sides of the border are open now, but traffic has yet to return in pre-pandemic numbers. Restrictions made crossing the border so complicated that Canadian residents avoided it and are still staying home, some County business owners said, noting they have lost many of their cross-border customers.
“It seems we haven’t got much of that business back,” said Mark Tardif, manager of the Swamp Buck Restaurant & Lounge in Fort Kent. “We are getting a little bit of Canadian traffic, but less than a quarter of what we used to.”
Tardif attributes the situation to vaccine and testing requirements. Canadian customers who have returned have told him they didn’t want to go through the hassle, he said.
Sales at the restaurant were lower during the pandemic, but upticks in local customers helped offset the losses, Tardif said.
In 2021, the restaurant was running at 50 percent of its capacity and depending on local customers and snowmobilers, according to a Bangor Daily News report.
Both the U.S. and Canada closed their borders in March 2020. For more than a year, no one entered either country, with rare exceptions for essential travel.
Then in August 2021, Canada let fully vaccinated Americans in, with testing requirements and use of the ArriveCAN app to answer questions about their trip. The U.S. opened the border to Canadians in November 2021 with vaccine restrictions.
A surge in the COVID-19 delta variant in the fall of 2021 sparked caution, and New Brunswick restarted a state of emergency. The land borders were open to U.S. residents who were vaccinated, but closed to Canadian travelers.
In April 2022, Canada eased restrictions and in October reopened its border without vaccine requirements. In May of this year, the U.S. lifted its vaccine restrictions and cross-border traffic could flow freely once again.
But so far, the flow of Canadian customers into Aroostook County is slow. In 2019, The County’s five busiest border stations — Madawaska, Houlton, Fort Kent, Van Buren and Fort Fairfield — admitted more than 1.4 million people in personal vehicles, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Numbers tanked in March 2020 to less than 10 percent of normal. The same was true through 2021. Numbers started to tick up in April 2022, but so far the number of Canadians crossing at Aroostook borders is far less than pre-COVID numbers.
From January through August this year, the above five ports of entry have recorded 693,000 people. During that same period in 2019, more than 1 million people crossed.
Calais remains Maine’s busiest port of entry, followed by Madawaska and Houlton. Calais, too, is battling back after losing a chunk of its Canadian customers.
Some cross-border shoppers have returned to Trader Joe’s Outpost in Presque Isle, but Canadian business is still down about 35 to 40 percent from before the pandemic, manager Jamie Forsman said.
“I’ve had people coming in recently that I haven’t seen in three years,” she said. “They had a hard time coming across the border. The vaccines, the testing – they just didn’t want to cross.”
Goods are often cheaper on this side of the border, and Forsman wishes more Canadians would return to The County. Since restrictions have lifted, people seem a little more relaxed about traveling into the U.S., she said.
Melanie Slauenwhite has managed Marden’s in Presque Isle since February, and before that was manager at the Houlton location. The number of Canadian cars in the parking lot is growing, she said, but slowly.
“I think that the Canadian public is probably still very cautious. We all know what the pandemic did as far as restrictions,” Slauenwhite said. “They are coming back, just not to the level of pre-COVID.”
