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The Loonie Just Hit a 14-Month Low — Here's What It's Costing You

   Saturday, July 25, 2026 The Canadian dollar has slid to its weakest level since April 2025, and speculators are betting it has further to fall. Here's why it's happening and what it actually means for your wallet. If you've bought anything in U.S. dollars lately — a flight, an Amazon.com order, a hotel for a Florida trip — you may have noticed the exchange rate isn't doing you any favours. The Canadian dollar touched 1.4248 per U.S. dollar (about 70.2 U.S. cents ) last week, its weakest level in 14 months, before steadying closer to 1.41 . It's not just a bad week. Currency speculators have piled into bets against the loonie so aggressively that the Canadian dollar has overtaken the Japanese yen as the most heavily shorted major currency in the world, according to data from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Net short positions against the CAD hit roughly US$12.5 billion — the largest bearish bet on the loonie since December 2024. Why the loonie is ...

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Canada’s Population Growth and the National Bank of Canada’s Report

 

According to a report by the National Bank of Canada, Canada is caught in a “population trap” for the first time in modern history and needs to limit immigration to escape it. A population trap is when the population is growing so fast that all available savings are needed to maintain the existing capital-labour ratio, making any increase in living standards impossible. 

National Bank’s report joins the growing chorus of concern that the influx of newcomers over the past two years, many of whom are temporary workers or students, is too much for the economy to handle.

Canada’s population grew by 1.2 million in 2023, a “staggering” amount when you consider that the next biggest surge was when Newfoundland joined the nation in 1949. From a global perspective, Canada’s population growth of 3.2% last year was five times higher than the average of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations. 

The economists say that Canada currently lacks the infrastructure and capital stock to adequately absorb current population growth and improve its standard of living. The strain is most evident in housing, with National saying the shortfall has reached a record of only one housing start for every 4.2 people entering the working-age population. Government programs are underway to address this, but to meet demand and reduce housing inflation, Canada would need to double its housing construction capacity to about 700,000 starts a year.

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