Cross-border shopping by the numbers

Canadians appear to be doing more shopping in the United States.

The number of same-day trips they made by automobile rose 16 per cent in 2011 from the year before. However, the 28 million same-day car trips Canadians made to the U.S. in 2011 pales in comparison with the nearly 60 million made in 1991.

Other evidence of increased cross-border shopping by Canadians comes from sales tax data in the U.S.

Erie County, which borders Canada and includes Buffalo, N.Y., set a record last year for sales tax receipts, which were up 4.5 per cent from 2010. Cross-border shopping was the main reason mentioned by county officials for that increase.

When cross-border shopping by Canadians goes up, it's often attributed to growing strength of the loonie. That was certainly the case in the late 1980s and early '90s, when the Canadian dollar rose 21 per cent and same-day automobile trips more than doubled.

However, when the Canadian dollar made its huge run beginning in 2002 and zoomed past parity in 2007, same-day trips by Canadians showed only a slight increase.

"The close relationship between the exchange rate and same-day auto trips from 1986 to 2001 weakened substantially as border security tightened following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and has not been re-established since," according to a 2007 Statistics Canada study.

The combination of currency movements and increased security did cut in half the amount of cross-border shopping by Americans in Canada, according to the StatsCan study.

Statistics Canada uses same-day automobile trips as its main measure of cross-border shopping, but does note that some of those trips are for other purposes.

Here are more figures on cross-border shopping.