US President Trump says Canada has been ripping us off for decades; Canada takes advantage of airlines.

• Canada is tougher to deal with than China or Vietnam.
• Canada has felt emboldened.

Rhetoric of this kind from this president has historically been the opening move in a negotiating sequence rather than a policy endpoint: public escalation, a threatened or actual tariff measure, then bilateral talks in which the terms soften. The established pattern with Canada in past trade disputes of this administration has run through the same channels: the auto and lumber sectors, dairy and supply management, and the cross-border energy relationship, with CAD bearing the initial strain on the trade-sensitive side. The distinction worth drawing is between rhetoric aimed at leverage ahead of scheduled talks and rhetoric preceding an executive action; the former has tended to fade from pricing within sessions, the latter has moved the loonie and Canadian-exposed equities until the legal and retaliatory picture clarifies. Ottawa's prior form has been calibrated retaliation aimed at politically sensitive US states rather than broad escalation. The follow-ons that matter are any concrete tariff or sectoral reference, the response from Canadian officials, and whether the language extends to the airline claim into an actual measure, which would be a new channel relative to past episodes. As verbal intervention alone, the signal is directional on CAD and thin on durability.