AI Analysis: Non-resident visitors entering Canada, by country of residence, seasonally-adjusted

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's monthly dataset (Table 24100051) tracks seasonally-adjusted non-resident visitors to Canada from January 2010 to January 2026, covering 89 countries across 193 monthly periods. The data tells a clear three-act story: steady pre-pandemic growth peaking at 2,748,609 visitors in December 2019, a catastrophic 98% COVID-19 collapse to 54,566 in May 2020, and a strong recovery to 2,585,992 by January 2026. The United States dominates as the largest visitor source, the distribution is heavily right-skewed with most country-month records clustered near zero, and 73 statistical outliers capture the pandemic's unprecedented disruption.

Key Findings

• Visitor counts peaked at 2,748,609 in December 2019 before COVID-19 caused a 98% collapse to just 54,566 in May 2020 — the most extreme anomaly in the dataset's 16-year history.
• Recovery has been near-complete, with January 2026 recording 2,585,992 visitors — approximately 94% of the pre-pandemic peak.
• The United States is by far the largest source of non-resident visitors to Canada, consistently dominating both average monthly counts and total volume across the full 2010–2026 period.
• The distribution of visitor counts is strongly right-skewed: the mean (81,664) is over 15x the median (5,109), and 75% of all records fall below 28,502 visitors, reflecting how a handful of high-traffic countries drive overall totals.
• 73 data points were flagged as statistical outliers (z-score > 2), with the COVID-19 period (2020–2021) accounting for the most severe deviations and a secondary cluster of elevated outliers appearing in late 2015 through 2016.
• The standard deviation of 287,558 — more than 3x the mean — reflects extreme variability across the 89 tracked countries and time periods, underscoring how concentrated international travel to Canada is among a small number of source nations.
• The seasonally-adjusted nature of the data, combined with 193 monthly observations, makes the dataset well-suited for identifying structural long-term trends, with the correlation matrix confirming that most major source countries move together in response to global travel shocks like the pandemic.