AI Analysis: International travellers entering or returning to Canada, by type of transportation and traveller type, seasonally-adjusted

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 24100054 tracks 193 months of seasonally-adjusted international travel into Canada (January 2010 – January 2026), revealing a dataset dominated by US residents and returning Canadian residents across air and land transportation modes. The most defining event in the 16-year series is the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a 92.5% collapse in travel volumes in April 2020, followed by a strong but incomplete recovery to approximately 6.74 million travellers by January 2026 — still slightly below the January 2010 level of 7.1 million. Across 9,071 records and 47 data series, the data is right-skewed and highly variable, with a mean of 940,337 and a median of 532,258, reflecting the wide range of transportation modes and traveller categories captured.

Key Findings

• The COVID-19 pandemic caused a historic 92.5% drop in international travellers, with April 2020 recording just 586,226 arrivals compared to a pre-COVID monthly average of approximately 6.75 million.
• As of January 2026, total international travellers stand at approximately 6.74 million per month — a strong post-pandemic recovery but still slightly below the January 2010 baseline of 7.1 million.
• The dataset is strongly right-skewed, with a mean of 940,337 and a median of 532,258 across 9,071 records, driven by a wide mix of high-volume aggregate categories and low-volume transportation sub-categories.
• US residents entering Canada and non-resident visitors are nearly perfectly correlated (r = 0.999), confirming that US travellers overwhelmingly dominate non-resident international arrivals to Canada.
• Excursionists (same-day visitors) show the most skewed distribution of any traveller type, with a mean of 488,000 but a median of only 41,000, indicating highly irregular same-day travel patterns across the 16-year period.
• Canadian residents returning from countries other than the US show the weakest correlations with other traveller series (r = -0.468 against US air and other-mode travellers), suggesting this segment moves independently of mainstream travel flows.
• Outside the 2020–2021 pandemic window, no individual months were flagged as statistical outliers (z-score > 2.5), indicating the series is otherwise stable with a coefficient of variation of 31.7% driven almost entirely by COVID-19 disruption.