President Donald Trump used a Sunday Truth Social post to call the US-Canada exchange rate unacceptable, adding a currency complaint to an already heated tariff fight. “Canada’s (currency) Dollar imbalance with the U.S. is unacceptable,” he wrote, adding it had been that way for years but no longer. He didn’t specify what he wants done about it.
Ottawa’s counter-tariffs on $27.6 billion of American goods, matching Washington’s 50% duties dollar for dollar, take effect September 8, just two days after Trump’s post.
Related: Trump Tells Canadian Companies to Relocate or Keep Paying Tariffs
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Canada’s currency was close to even with the US dollar through the 2010s, slid to about 1.25 by 2021, and now sits near 1.38. A weaker Canadian dollar lowers what American buyers pay for Canadian goods and raises what Canadians pay for American ones, and Trump grouped that kind of gap with what he called “hidden tricks” in a follow-up post the same day, alongside underpricing and mimicking American goods.
Canada’s dollar floats freely, though — the Bank of Canada hasn’t stepped in to move its value since 1998, and officials there have said the rate reflects market forces rather than policy.
Flavio Volpe, president of the Canadian Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, calculated what currency parity would have meant for 2025. Had the loonie traded even with the US dollar all year, he found, the extra cost of Canadian imports to American buyers would have run about $152 billion, while Canadian buyers would have saved roughly $133 billion on what they spent on American goods, a combined swing of $285 billion. “Who will tell him?” he asked.
The Office of the US Trade Representative put 2025 US goods imports from Canada at $381.9 billion and goods exports to Canada at $333.6 billion, while the US dollar averaged close to 1.40 Canadian dollars across the year. Recalculating both totals at parity produces almost exactly the swings Volpe cited.
The exercise assumes trade volumes would stay fixed in local-currency terms regardless of the exchange rate, so it works better as an illustration than a forecast, but the direction is clear: a stronger Canadian dollar would cost American importers more than it would save American exporters.
Inside the Trump administration, the message on the dollar has been inconsistent. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly said the government maintains a strong dollar policy — in January, pressed on the question, he told reporters flatly that Washington wasn’t intervening in currency markets.
Trump struck a different note around the same time, calling the dollar’s more than 10% year-over-year decline “great.” He also said he’d seen China and Japan devalue their own currencies in ways he considers unfair to US competitiveness.
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