A 50 percent US tariff on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods is due to take effect at midnight unless a trade deal is finalized, and USD/CAD has spent two weeks pricing the outcome ahead of the headlines.

Daily crossings through the Strait of Hormuz fell from 19 to 3 over the past week as President Trump threatened to bomb Oman, the neutral party brokering a shipping deal, introducing a new failure mode for the crisis.

Canada's overall exports to the US fell 5.8 percent. The two disputed categories fell 22 and 81 percent, and that gap is the entire legal case.

A vessel struck overnight, Iran's language just got sharper, and Trump has widened the threat to a third country. Oil is up, but nowhere near March's peak. That gap is the story.

The interim ceasefire and the sanctioned toll authority's 60-day waiver both lapse today, and neither expiry resolves how oil is actually still moving through the strait.

Trump and Iran's foreign minister traded accusations over control of the strait, but the price move came from the IEA and OPEC's demand forecasts, not the conflict itself.

Brent snapped a six session rally Thursday, not because anything resolved in the Strait of Hormuz, but because a genuine forecasting split between the world's two largest energy bodies finally showed up in price.

A CENTCOM missile strike, a deadly Houthi attack in the Red Sea, and a Trump demand for war reparations are running on one track this week. Advanced talks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are running on another. Oil is pricing both at once.

A tanker attack, a Saudi refinery strike and dueling preconditions have Brent near a five-week high, right as the Bank of Canada heads into its September decision.

Last week's oil selloff assumed a Hormuz deal was close. Iran's weekend preconditions confirm it is not, and the chain runs straight back to the Bank of Canada's inflation math.

The reported Iran-Oman shipping agreement faces three separate approval points before it changes anything for Canadian energy portfolios, and this week's gold rally was driven by something else entirely.

Markets have priced steady de-escalation. A nearly identical arrangement collapsed three weeks ago, and Wednesday brought both a Houthi tanker attack and an Iranian statement that the strait stays closed until the US ends its blockade.

Tuesday's TSX rally and 6.36% WTI decline priced Hormuz optimism as though the strait were reopening. What Iranian, American, and Omani officials are actually describing is a temporary, Iran-administered corridor with a stated one-to-three-month shelf life, and the two sides do not agree on its terms.

Trump called off what he described as the biggest strike on Iran since World War Two, then reissued an ultimatum within a day. The chain from that whiplash to Canadian portfolios runs through gasoline prices and the Bank of Canada's September 2 decision as much as through crude oil charts.

Fourteen vessels crossed the strait Wednesday without a political settlement behind them. The gap between operational improvement and an actual deal is where the risk to Canadian energy portfolios is sitting right now.

Wednesday's diplomatic track, the one this desk flagged as the base case two sessions ago, did not survive the week. WTI's climb back above $85 is the market's first read on whether this round of escalation resolves like the last one or does not.