Canada—U.S. Trade and Travel Patterns in the Post-Recession Period

The United States and Canada are entering a new political relationship that may lead to changes in economic relations between the two nations in the near future. Understanding current bilateral trade trends between the U.S. and Canada can help to inform predictions of future trade patterns if relations remain constant and to determine impacts if changes do occur. This Border Policy Brief explores trade patterns at the national scale, as well as trends in top bilaterally traded commodities and the ports that process them. The Brief provides an update to a previous BPRI research project authored by Globerman and Storer (2014), which predicted port infrastructure needs based on projected changes in the top bilaterally traded commodities between the U.S. and Canada.2 Recent transportation and census data indicate that many of the trends observed in 2014 are still indicative of today, although there are some notable differences in the pre– and post-recession years