ICYMI: Pappas Pushes Relief as Trump’s Trade War Hits New Hampshire Small Businesses

MANCHESTER, NH – In case you missed it, the New Hampshire Bulletin recently reported that New Hampshire’s small inns and hotels are feeling the squeeze as Canadian tourism — long a backbone of the Granite State economy — continues to nosedive because of Donald Trump’s trade war.

Across New Hampshire, small inns and tourist attractions that rely on Canadian visitors are reporting fewer bookings and greater uncertainty, even as operating costs soar. For many of these businesses, there is no corporate cushion — and under Trump’s chaotic tariff regime, local businesses are being forced to absorb the cost of lost tourism, skyrocketing prices, and economic instability.

Congressman Pappas is fighting to provide relief. 

Pappas’s Small Business RELIEF Act would exempt New Hampshire small businesses from global baseline and reciprocal tariffs and issue refunds to those that have already been forced to shoulder the costs of Washington’s trade war. He also championed the CANADA Act, which would protect U.S.-owned small businesses from tariffs imposed on Canada, protecting New Hampshire’s economy and preserving the cross-border commerce that so many Granite State businesses depend on.

Pappas has taken Trump’s tariffs all the way to the Supreme Court, filing an amicus brief alongside 170 House Democrats and 36 Senators.

Read excerpts from the New Hampshire Bulletin below: 

New Hampshire Bulletin: Small inns, hotels bear the burden of slouching Canadian tourism

By Molly Rains, 02/09/26

  • […]
  • Consistently throughout the couple’s first four years owning the bed and breakfast, as much as a third of the Nutmeg Inn’s guests have typically hailed from abroad, said Kevin LaSella. The largest group among those international visitors were Canadian. At certain times, like Laconia’s annual Bike Week, the proportion of Canadian lodgers in the Nutmeg’s guest rooms grew to nearly half.
  • Then, last year, that abruptly changed. During the summer of 2025, the LaSellas say they welcomed only one Canadian couple to the inn all season long.
  • This year, bookings from up North are looking quieter, too. By this time, said Kevin LaSella, reservations from Canadian travelers have typically begun to trickle in — but so far, next summer’s numbers are on par with what the Nutmeg Inn saw in 2025. LaSella is worried it’s a sign that President Donald Trump’s fraught relationship with Canada and other countries, characterized by fluctuating tariffs and volatile rhetoric, will jeopardize the future of small hospitality businesses throughout the state.
  • “We can weather the storm of last year, so to speak,” he said. “But when you’re getting hit on both sides, you’re getting hit because of the geopolitical rhetoric and it hits your revenue by 15%, and then on the expense side of the business you get squeezed. … That’s a progressively less profitable, or potentially not profitable at all, business.”
  • In August, Taylor Caswell, who at the time was serving as commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs, estimated that Canadian tourism to New Hampshire was down 30% from the year before. […]
  • But not all parts of the state’s hospitality industry, and not all areas, have been affected equally. Vacation spots that classically draw large numbers of Canadian tourists, like the Seacoast and White Mountains regions, have felt the impact most.
  • From 2024 to 2025, Canadian-made bookings at New Hampshire state park campsites were “way down,” Department of Natural and Cultural Resources spokesperson Gregory Keeler said in an email. In 2024, about 3,400 camping reservations came in from Canada; in 2025, that number dropped by 64% to just over 1,200.
  • And at Hampton Beach, “the whole community was affected,” said Shahin Pervaiz, who has owned the Emerald Isle Inn, a hotel about a mile from the beach, for 22 years. For much of that time, Canadian visitors were about half of the 25-room inn’s clientele, Pervaiz said. This summer, the Emerald Isle welcomed almost no Canadian visitors.
  • This was true across the community, according to Pervaiz, who said some of her colleagues in the local hospitality scene were struggling to pay their bills this winter. “The business, and everything, is not the way it was anymore,” Pervaiz said.
  • The decline in Canadian visitation resulted in a 15% revenue drop at the Nutmeg Inn year-over-year from 2024 to 2025, said Kevin LaSella. That was compounded by volatile costs that LaSella connected to tariffs imposed by the presidential administration. One day, when he went to purchase a freezer full of coffee for breakfast service, LaSella saw that the price had grown by about one-third. At first, he thought the coffee had been mislabeled.
  • “Now I’m spending that much more for something that we can’t do without,” LaSella said.
  • […]
  • Since taking office for his second term in January 2025, Trump has made repeated references to annexing Canada, calling it the “51st state.” He has also imposed significant new and fluctuating tariffs on top imports from Canada and others among the United States’ trading partners.
  • Caswell, who accompanied New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte on a trade mission to Canada in September […] said, he heard from Canadians that Trump’s comments had damaged their view of the nation as a whole.
  • […]
  • The LaSellas said they heard similar concerns from their British relatives and few remaining international guests.
  • “It’s because of the geopolitical stuff, the fear factor of issues at the border with visas, how they might be treated, and then just being offended, flat out, by all of the rhetoric going on,” Kevin LaSella said.

###