Point Roberts, Washington is a tiny American town that runs on Canadian money. To drive there from the rest of Washington state, you have to cross international borders twice.
The peninsula exists because of a cartographic accident. In 1846, the 49th parallel was extended to the Pacific, clipping a 5-square-mile chunk off what is now British Columbia and assigning it to the United States. The result is a small, scenic exclave surrounded by water on three sides, where roughly 1,100 year-round residents live in homes that are three-quarters Canadian-owned, and even the electricity and drinking water are supplied through commercial agreements with BC Hydro and Metro Vancouver.
For decades, the local economy ran on the same logic as the utilities: across the border. Canadians drove down from across the Lower Mainland for cheaper gas, weekend cottage stays, lunch by the water, and a delivery address that fixed the "doesn't ship to Canada" problem.
It was a workable arrangement, and a unique one. This is one of only a handful of places in the contiguous United States with no land connection to the rest of America, giving it no choice but to look north for customers and commerce..
Then came the tariffs. When the U.S. announced sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods in early February 2025, Canadians responded by changing their cross-border habits. Trips south slowed. Saturday excursions stopped. The visitor traffic that Point Roberts had depended on for decades thinned sharply within weeks.
The tariffs were a federal U.S. policy, but Point Roberts felt them as a slow, structural emptying of the customer base it had no way to replace.
Ali Hayton has been running International Marketplace, the only grocery store in Point Roberts, since 1998. The store is 38,000 square feet — built for the busy summer season, when day-trippers and weekenders filled the aisles. Before COVID, it served 5,000 to 6,000 customers a week. Right now, on a good week, it's somewhere between 2,000 and 2,800.
The border numbers tell the same story. In March 2019, more than 100,000 people crossed into Point Roberts. In March 2026, the number was about half that.
Hayton describes a loop that's hard to break. "I can't bring in as much because I'm not getting the traffic," she says. "And so then when I don't bring in as much, people go and they shop somewhere else." Less on the shelves means more customers driving to Tsawwassen or Bellingham. Customers driving to Tsawwassen means even less to put on the shelves.
The store is staying open because, as she puts it, it has to. "What does the mom do at seven o'clock at night when her two-year-old has a fever? She has to drive to another country to buy Tylenol?"
She is making maintenance choices she didn't have to make before. New roof, yes. New parking lot, no. New paint, no. Anything that doesn't keep the doors open gets put off.
She is sympathetic to the choice her customers are making. She just doesn't have a plan for the version of Point Roberts where they don't come back at all. "People have had so many opportunities to create new habits," she says. "And those are hard to undo."
Some Point Roberts operators didn't have the runway to wait that out.
Beth Calder co-owned Point to Point Parcel for almost 25 years. A fourth-generation Point Roberts resident and a dual citizen, Calder had already weathered a 19-month COVID border closure by laying off most of her staff and holding packages for customers stuck on the other side.
At its peak, Point to Point had 11 employees and was open 56 hours a week. Ninety-eight percent of its 53,000 active customers were Canadian. An average day brought 200 to 300 packages through the doors.
Within two weeks of the February 2025 tariff announcement, Calder's incoming volume was down by a third. By the end of the month, it was down by closer to two-thirds. Customers began emailing return labels for packages already sitting on her shelves. They wouldn't cross to pick them up.
"I couldn't be the type of person I am and expect you to buy something in the country I live in and try to take it back and be hit with all these tariffs," Calder says. "I couldn't sleep at night knowing that you're supporting me, but you doing that is hitting you harder."
Point to Point closed in April 2025, just shy of its 25th anniversary. "I just couldn't see a win anymore," Calder says. "We had to throw up the white flag."
The building is still empty. Calder says people occasionally pull into the parking lot and walk up to the door, peering in. They had no idea it closed.
Tamra Hansen owns the Saltwater Cafe and runs the Pier Restaurant at the marina. Both are roughly 90% Canadian-supported. A Canadian by birth, she has been in Point Roberts for 16 years. She had been hoping 2026 would mark some recovery after a hard 2025.
"This year, it's been a slow start, and I'm really nervous because the numbers are not even as good as they were last year," she says.
So Hansen is improvising. She's expanded her catering. She's driving to Bellingham herself to pick up product to save on the carrier markup. And she and a friend have just been approved to launch a flavoured salt company, the first manufacturing operation in Point Roberts since 1917.
Whether adaptation is enough to bridge what's been lost is the question every business in town is trying to answer.
More than a year on, the town that depended on Canadian visitors is still waiting to see what comes back. Point Roberts has weathered sharp drops in cross-border traffic before, after 9/11 and the long COVID border closures, but recovery in both cases took years.
What’s happening now is harder to time. The border is open, but Canadians have decided (for the moment) not to use it the way they used to, put off by a political situation that’s unlikely to change dramatically for at least a few years. For Point Roberts, it’s still an open question what will be left to salvage when — and if — it does change.
