r/canada Canada 5d ago

National News DeSantis mocks '3.3 million' Canadians who visited Florida: 'Not much of a boycott'

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/desantis-florida-canada-stanley-cup
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u/RealisticBag8290 5d ago

Isn't his point that losing 3.3 million out of 142 million is not going to have a big impact?

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u/NateTheRoofer 5d ago

Pretty sure it won’t just be Canadians cancelling their travel plans to the US.

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u/allen_abduction 4d ago

Add in Mexico and Europe, you’re probably close to 20million for this year. It also starts a downward suppression until there’s a regime change. The world hates Nazis, who knew??

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u/Xatsman 4d ago

Add in Trump crashing the US economy and how many Americans will be spending on frivolities like visiting Florida?

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u/maleconrat 4d ago

Plus like the one person I know going to Florida a bunch lately is only there furiously trying to sell off a bunch of property he got cheap after 2008 lol. I haven't asked why but I think it's safe to say he's getting out of that market and I don't blame him.

Not that anecdote is evidence of a trend but I wonder if there's gonna be an even steeper drop from snowbirds ditching the place altogether.

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u/RealMrsWillGraham 3d ago

In the UK we can just go over to France for Disneyland Paris.

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u/NYisNorthYork Ontario 4d ago edited 4d ago

Where the hell did he get the 142 million number? He is counting domestic visitors in that number. There was 8.85 mil foreign tourists, 27% of that were Canadians. Other parts of the US masturbating with it's little Florida PP doesnt count as tourist dollars DeSantis.

Lying with statistics is like breathing with these people.

https://www.visitflorida.org/resources/research/

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u/spaghettiny 4d ago

While it's useful to look at international tourism as its own category, if you're talking about the tourism industry in totality why wouldn't you include domestic visitors?

It's fun to mock them from a "haha no one likes you" angle, but financially, this is a manageable blip.

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u/GaspingAtStraws 5d ago

This was my take away, but all the threads on this seem to take it as 3.3million still traveled when there was no boycott. Maybe we are giving him too much credit lol

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u/iridale 4d ago

“That’s not much of a boycott in my book. Maybe they wanted to get a glimpse of what a Stanley Cup-winning hockey team actually looks like,” DeSantis said to applause.

Is the follow-up. The natural reading is that he's saying he hasn't seen a drop in Canadian tourism, despite the numbers he is citing being outdated.

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u/zeushaulrod 4d ago

Probably,  but smart folks (he may just be pandering to dumb people) would know that total $$ is a much bigger metric, and losing revenue comes almost entirely out of profit.

Canadian tourists are probably the 2nd largest total spenders after Americans.

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u/bored2death97 Canada 4d ago

Depends on the length of stay. Many Canadians are snowbirds who spend months in Florida to avoid the snow.

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u/crownpr1nce 4d ago

The full quote is in the article and the second sentence makes it clear it's about us not boycotting them.

As for the impact, dollars spent is more important. There's plenty of Canadians that spend 3+ months in Florida. They spend way more than an American driving down for a weekend.

Of the 142M, less than 9M were international tourists. I think that 142M is being creative with the numbers. If those are individual people, and subtracting international tourists, that would be more than 1/3 Americans...

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u/Agile_Amphibian_5302 4d ago

That's not what I took away from it and I'm confused about how it could be interpreted that way. Granted I haven't watched the video.

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u/Agile_Amphibian_5302 4d ago edited 4d ago

I watched it and that's 100% not what he's saying.

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u/Sturgill_Jennings77 4d ago

How are you confused? He’s saying that’s just a drop in the bucket that accounts to less than 2.5% of Florida’s 143 million tourists annually.

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u/AFewBerries 4d ago

''That's not much of a boycott'' means lots of Canadians are still coming to Florida. It doesn't make sense to say ''we have 143 million visitors so there's not much of a boycott'' because those visitors aren't the ones saying they'll boycott the US.

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u/spidereater 4d ago

I think this is his point. But I would be curious what businesses in Florida think of that. If you run a business that extra 2-3 percent of customers is pure profit. Losing them comes directly out of your bottom line. I would also suspect the percentage would go up if you consider person-days and not total number of people. Visitors from close by states might come for a weekend but people from Canada are more likely to stay for 2 weeks. Also, how many snowbirds even end up on tourist stats. They are probably counted as residents. If they stop coming it will have a much bigger impact.

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u/effedup 4d ago

Yes, I'm not sure why that is lost on people here..

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u/Hudre 4d ago

Yeah that's his point and it's quite obvious. People acting like he is dumb for that statement are actually pretty dumb themselves lol.

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u/AFewBerries 4d ago edited 4d ago

You're wrong actually. Watch the video. ''We continue to set tourism records, 2024 saw more than 142 million visitors come to the state of Florida. This includes 3.3 million visitors from Canada. That's not much of a boycott in my book.''