🎶 Oh, Canada, our home and native land . . .

I love Canada. Every event prof I know loves Canada. Or at the very least, nobody has a bad thing to say about Canadians. Alas, Canadians, those most loyal of allies, don’t like America so much anymore.

For reasons that defy logic, Trump has managed to piss off Canadians so badly that he’s united the French and English speaking parts like never before. The result: an unprecedented drop in events booked in the U.S. by Canadian firms, and a similar decline in Canadian attendance at events here.

Oh, and we might very well be facing an extinction-level event from our AI overlords within the next three years, in which case none of this will matter. Good times!

In this issue:

• Anthropic whistle-blower triggers AI extermination panic

• Annette Greg leaves SITE

• Interview with 2 industry CEOs who are feeling the cold war with Canada

• Why Canadians are so angry (hint: it’s not the tariffs)

• The impact if Canada joins the E.U.

• What to do about it

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Updates & Industry News

• In a scene that could’ve been lifted from The Terminator movies, former Antropic researcher Jacob Coxon posted on X last week that he resigned because, basically, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The thread has been viewed over 170 million times and spawned countless articles and responses, including calls by rival CEOs Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk to slow down AI development until we can figure how to not let it kill us. If you choose to stop reading this newsletter and start prepping for the robot apocalypse, I wouldn’t blame you. But seriously, this is some scary-ass shit.

• James Carville famously said, if there is reincarnation “I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Treasury bond yields reached their highest level in two decades. In response, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates yesterday, the first time in over 3 years, in an effort to tame stubborn inflation.

• Last week I moderated a fun panel on The Innovation Shift: New Leadership Paradigms for Exhibitions Growth at IAEE’s CEIR Predict in DC, along with 360 Live Media President Jack Macleod, Optica’s Chief Meetings & Exhibits Officer (glad to see more people with titles like these!) Lauren Parr, and Founder of Content With Impact, Kara Dickerson. While we shared a number of innovative event trends, the key takeaway was the importance of creating a culture - and having a CEO - that nurtures innovation; otherwise the innovative people will leave. That may sound anodyne - as Lauren said, “Every CEO says their organization is innovative” - but I’ve worked with way too many CEOs whose actions completely undermine innovation among their ranks.

• Annette Gregg is stepping down from her role as CEO of SITE to become CEO of the World Trade Centers Association. I’ve known Annette for a long time, and she’s one of the nicest, most competent leaders in our industry. In her four years leading SITE, she nearly doubled paid membership to its highest level ever, saw record event attendance, and achieved SITE’s largest revenue and profit levels in its history. For a trade industry association, particularly in the events industry, that growth is unheard of. She leaves big shoes to fill.

• For those who couldn’t make the Event Agency C-Suite Summit in May, micebook created this helpful recap and post-event report. Planning for the 2027 Summit is starting now, so if you have ideas for sessions, formats, etc. please reach out.

• I’ll be speaking on the State of M&A at IAEE’s flagship event, Expo! Expo!, November 16-18 in Milwaukee. This is my first time at the event, and would love to connect with fellow readers. If you’ll be there, shoot me a note!

• December 1-3 I’ll be back at EDPA ACCESS (Experiential Designers & Producers Association) conference, this time at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, leading a session on M&A Trends for the Exhibit Industry.

#ElbowsUp

Last spring, when Trump started levying tariffs and trolling allies (Canada becoming the 51st state, annexing Greenland, etc.) there were a number of articles covering the impact to the U.S. events industry by Nicola Kastner, Kai Hattendorf, Jason Koop, Andrea Doyle, Padraic Gilligan, David Adler and others. While much of that coverage has abated, the negative effects are just as real, if not further solidified.

Living in the U.S., one can become somewhat numb to the constant shenanigans coming out of the White House, such as Trump’s insistence on renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America (which, despite being an infantile response, has generated some truly epic memes).

However, what may induce eye rolls here is engendering real anger in Canada and elsewhere, along with a massive surge in national pride, which the U.S. meetings and events industry is feeling the consequences of.

I’ve had several conversations with event business CEOs which help illustrate this point.

CEO Conversation #1: The Agency Leader

Last week I spoke to the CEO of one of Canada's largest meeting & incentive agencies. Here's a snippet from our conversation:

ME: How's business?

CEO: Really good. We're tracking at or slightly ahead of budget for this year, and already have more on the books for 2027 than we did at this time last year. The only thing is . . .

ME: What?

CEO: Well, practically all of our Canadian clients are avoiding the U.S. as a destination for their events. Because of Trump. Sorry.

ME: Is it his policies or his rhetoric?

CEO: Both. We've always thought of our economies and countries as deeply linked, almost like family. But since Trump got back in office it's been a non-stop onslaught against Canada. Even if we could convince our clients to book, say, an incentive event somewhere in the U.S., their employees would go nuts. It's almost a non-starter now.

ME: Where are those events going, if not to the U.S.?

CEO: A lot of them are going to Europe. And they’re finding that it’s easier than they previously thought, and their attendees love it.

ME: How or when do you see that changing?

CEO: When he's out of office. Come January 2029* we can hit 'send' on a ton of RFPs to our U.S. partners, whom we love working with by the way. So many people here in the events industry feel that way. They love the U.S., and can't wait to go back, but it's become almost radioactive now.

*NOTE: This CEO isn’t saying she can book events now in the U.S. which will take place in 2029. She’s saying they can’t even consider booking in the U.S. until then, meaning that event revenue won’t hit our books until late 2029 or 2030 and beyond.

It’s the Attitude, Not the Tariffs

As I’ve previously written, it takes a lot to piss off Canadians, but we've managed to do it. And what I’m hearing in conversations is that it’s not really about the tariffs, which are a policy decision.

Whenever people are unhappy with government policies, those who enacted them like to respond with Obama’s witty rejoinder that “elections have consequences”. That’s true, and if the U.S. government chooses to levy tariffs, for whatever reason, that’s their prerogative.

There are two problems with this. One, the Constitution vests this power solely with Congress, not the President, which the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed. But since Republicans control both houses of Congress, they have the votes to implement them anyway.

[However, Trump’s tariffs now have little basis in economic policy, but are instead vehicles to serve his own personal interests. Case in point: last fall he raised tariffs on Canada by 10% because Ontario aired a commercial using audio from a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan warning about the dangers of international tariffs. Another example: last July he whacked Brazil with tariffs up to 50% simply because he didn’t like their prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro.]

The other, and far larger, problem is the rhetoric, including the name calling and debasement of Canada’s leaders, particularly Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford. In the past, trade agreements between nations were negotiated in private, not through bombastic and inflammatory Tweets, which only serve to rile up the populations of the countries we’re negotiating with.

The Impact on the U.S. Event Industry

Trump’s nonsense about referring to Canada as our 51st state, repeated by our lickspittle Vice President, among others, is easily the biggest driver of Canadian outrage and national pride. So much so, that it is largely responsible for Mark Carney’s ascension to Prime Minister last year. His Liberal Party was badly trailing the Conservative Party by 27% in December, 2024, and only turned around those numbers by taking a strong, yet dignified stance in response to Trump’s attacks.

Why am I sharing this? Internal Canadian politics isn’t exactly my purview in this newsletter, but it perfectly illustrates my point about how angry we’ve made Canadians. Trump’s treatment of Canada got them so mad, and inspired such a wellspring of national pride, that it literally flipped a federal election from what looked like a Conservative landslide into a narrow Liberal victory.

Ian Bremmer, CEO of the geopolitical consulting firm the Eurasia Group, which puts out an annual list of the top risks facing the world each year, wrote this on X:

This is on top of increasingly strict visa and entry requirements for inbound travelers to the U.S., which may not sound like that big of a deal, but is in fact a concern of many planners, who don’t want to risk key executives, speakers or other attendees not being able to enter the country.

This is one of the reasons that many associations, particularly medical ones, who for years rotated their annual conferences between the U.S. and Europe, are skipping the U.S. now. And since these events are often booked several years out, we won't see the full effect for a while.

CEO Conversation #2: The Event Leader

That anger not only manifests in a large number of Canadian meetings and incentives NOT booking the U.S., it also shows up in dramatic declines in Canadian attendance at U.S. events. These Canadians either don’t want to come to U.S. conferences themselves, or if they do want to attend, their companies are not covering the cost. Either way, it’s a big problem for events that rely on a decent chunk of Canadian participation.

As an example, the chart above shows a $400K+ drop in registration revenue from Canadian attendees at an annual business conference whose CEO I spoke to this week.

ME: How’s your event shaping up this fall?

CEO: It’s a mixed bag. Domestic registration is holding strong, but foreign attendance has fallen off a cliff.

ME: How bad?

CEO: We’re down like 40-50%, particularly from Canada, which is far and away our largest source of international attendees. We’re doing everything we can to make it easy for them to register. We’re even offering to give them the same U.S. price in Canadian dollars, which is almost a 30% hit for us

ME: Is that making an impact?

CEO: It’s barely making a dent; they just don’t want to come here now. And that lost revenue is going to be hard to replace.

And this is far from an isolated incident. As Andrea Doyle reported in Skift Meetings this week, several association meeting planners shared similar experiences. INFORMS, which hosts five flagship meetings a year, said “We went from hundreds of Canadians to dozens of Canadians attending our meeting.”

There’s not great data on this, but Skift reports that, despite recent upticks, travel from Canada to the U.S. is still down 27% from two years ago, though that includes leisure travlers.

Will Canada Join the E.U.?

I've had similar conversations the past few months with event executives from Europe, even those with U.S. offices or those looking to expand here. They report that event leaders at companies and associations have never been more reluctant to book their meetings and incentives in America.

Beyond tariffs, Trump’s ongoing degradation of NATO, including threats to annex Greenland (part of Denmark, a NATO ally), have made European countries feel they can’t rely on the U.S. anymore from a security standpoint. Further, what’s often lost in the current trade war with Canada is the fact that Trump seemingly had no problem ripping up his own USMCA trade agreement with Canada & Mexico, which he lauded as a replacement for NAFTA.

In my last post I talked about the critical importance of trust in M&A deals, and how the erosion of that trust can be a key reason for deals to fall apart. What we’re seeing here is a real degradation of trust in the United States, and our credibility as a partner.

One outcome of this is that countries will start making other alliances, the latest example being Carney’s push to have Canada join the European Union as an associate member.

You might think, ‘who cares? But if that happens, and Canadians have visa-free travel to the EU and frictionless, tariff-free trade, both Canadians and Europeans would have a lot less incentive to book or attend events in the U.S.

What To Do About It

Event professionals have taken for granted the incredibly close relationship between the U.S. and Canada. Agencies and suppliers work seamlessly across borders, while venues and destinations routinely consider the Canadian market an extension of ours. Canadian attendance at U.S. events has long been a no-brainer for event organizers, many of whom have come to rely on their participation and support.

We’re going to see how well we manage with a significant decline in business from Canada. I hope this turns around quickly, but I can’t say I’m confident. Most CEOs I speak to there say they’ll come back once Trump leaves office, but I’m not so sure, particularly after another two years of this.

So what can, or should, we do about this?

• Reach out to your elected officials to let them know how you’re being impacted by any of these policies or actions. Ballotpedia is one of many sites with a Who Represents Me page, where you can enter your address and quickly get links to your Senators and Representatives. I’ve been told that calling is more powerful than emailing, so try doing both.

• One group that is doing something is the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance, an industry lobbying organization ably led by Tommy Goodwin, where you can become a social influencer to advocate for their policy initiatives. I also highly recommend participating in their Legislative Action Day in May.

• Share your situation with industry peers on social media. Contact editors of trade publications. Reach out to your association leadership (try board members and local chapter leaders). Let them know how your events are being impacted by the tariffs, bullying rhetoric or other actions and policies. Keep the politics out of it, and focus on the direct impact to your business.

• For business owners and those responsible for event P&Ls, it might be prudent to prepare for an ongoing - and possibly accelerated - decline in inbound business from our neighbor to the north.

• If you’re a U.S. agency, this is a good time to consider acquiring an agency in Canada or Europe, to broaden your exposure. There are a number of quality event agencies there that would welcome joining forces with a U.S. entity.

• Continue nurturing those Canadian and European relationships. Eventually this phase we’re in will lift (🙏🤞), and when it does, those relationships will prove critical.

• Double down on efforts to cultivate and expand reach to clients and attendees within the U.S., which is still proving to be more resilient than most people had thought.

Unfortunately, I think we’re in for another two years of this dynamic, so buckle up. Inbound business from Canada and Europe should pick up markedly in 2029. That is, assuming AI hasn’t made us all extinct by then.

Here’s to taking your event business to the next level!

Howard Givner
Senior Advisor | Oaklins: DeSilva & Phillips (M&A)
CEO | Heathcote Advisory Group (Consulting)

Catch up on recent articles:

• The #1 Reason M&A Deals Fall Through

• What’s Keeping Agency Owners Up At Night

• Narrow & Deep | Iran War Impact | Agency Summit Update

• Gradually and then Suddenly: the Widening Eventprofs AI Gap

• A Slew of Event M&A Deals to End the Year

• Mastering the Exit Strategy: Insights On Selling Event Businesses

• The View From Private Equity

• Tailwinds

• Preparing Your Event Business For Sale

If and when you’re ready, here are ways I work with event business owners and executives:

• Business Coaching & Owner Accountability

• Business Diagnostic & Company Valuation

• Growth Consulting

• Exit Planning

• M&A (Buy Side & Sell Side)

Wanna chat? Email me to schedule a call.

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