Market Data

The Loonie at 1.4132: The Hidden Currency Discount on Canadian Aluminum and Lumber

Canada is the top foreign supplier of aluminum and softwood lumber to U.S. plants; here is how a 1.4132 exchange rate quietly moves those landed costs.

With the Canadian dollar at 1.4132 per U.S. dollar as of Jul 10, 2026 (Federal Reserve H.10), a Canadian mill's C$3,000-per-tonne aluminum bill converts to about $2,123, a currency discount of roughly 12% versus a 1.25 rate, before any tariff or freight is applied. For the metals- and lumber-intensive plants that buy heavily from Canada, the exchange rate is doing more to their input costs than most line items procurement actually negotiates.

Why this rate shows up in your BOM

Canada is the largest foreign supplier of both primary aluminum and softwood lumber to the United States, Quebec smelters and British Columbia and prairie sawmills feed U.S. extruders, die casters, truss plants, and building-products lines. Canadian producers incur their costs in Canadian dollars: hydroelectric power, mill labor, stumpage, inland freight to the border. When the loonie is cheap against the dollar, those costs shrink in U.S.-dollar terms, and competition among Canadian sellers passes much of that through to U.S. buyers even when contracts are written in USD. The same C$600 per thousand board feet of lumber converts to about $425 at today's 1.4132, versus $480 at a 1.25 rate, identical mill economics, materially different landed cost. Note what the currency does not touch: Section 232 duties on aluminum and countervailing duties on Canadian softwood are levied on the declared value, so tariff policy and FX stack on top of each other rather than offsetting.

CAD per USD, Jul 10, 2026 (Federal Reserve H.10): 1.4132. Traded between 1.3927 (Jun 10, 2026) and 1.4237 (Jun 24, 2026) across the archived daily readings.

Who captures the currency move

The FX discount is real, but who pockets it is a negotiation. Suppliers invoicing in Canadian dollars pass the move through automatically, your dollar cost floats with the rate, which cuts in your favor when the loonie is cheap and against you when it firms. Suppliers invoicing in U.S. dollars keep the currency gain themselves unless you ask for it: their peso, their loonie, costs fell, their USD price did not. That makes the current rate an audit tool. Take your Canadian suppliers' USD price lists, divide the underlying CAD cost implied at the old rate, and ask what happened to the difference. Buyers who benchmark in the supplier's home currency consistently recover part of the move; buyers who only ever see the USD line item do not know there is anything to recover.

Tariffs are negotiated in Washington; the currency moves every day. Only one of them is on your supplier scorecard.

The monthly buy, worked through

Take a die caster buying 20 tonnes of Canadian aluminum a month at C$3,000 per tonne, a C$60,000 monthly invoice. At today's 1.4132, that settles at about $42,457; at a 1.25 loonie it would be $48,000. The gap, roughly $5,543 a month, $66,518 a year, is pure currency, larger than most annual price-productivity clauses. The planning implication runs both ways: budget at today's rate and a loonie recovery erases the discount; lock forwards or negotiate CAD-denominated pricing while the rate is favorable and you keep it. Either way, put the exchange rate on the same review cadence as the metal index, it is moving your cost per pound just as surely.

Use the tariff impact calculator to layer duties on top of the currency-adjusted price and see the true landed cost of Canadian metal. Stack FX and tariffs correctly

Published 2026-07-13.