Air Canada says demand for flights between Canadian and US cities is weak for the spring and summer months, as Canadians respond to the trade war by avoiding trips south.  

Bookings for transborder flights were down 10% for the April-to-September period compared with the same period last year, as of mid-March, according to a presentation at the company’s annual meeting. 

Air Canada is the largest Canadian airline and flies to more US destinations than any other. “Am I concerned?,” Chairman Vagn Sørensen said in a response to a question from a shareholder during Monday’s meeting. “Yes, definitely, I’m concerned.”

Shares of Air Canada are down 35% since the beginning of the year.

Air Canada and WestJet said in separate statements last week that geopolitical tensions are causing some consumers to choose not to take vacations in the US. The shift is part of a larger boycott of American products in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his repeated statements that he believes Canada should be part of the US.

Sørensen added that the company is seeing strong demand for transatlantic flights to European destinations. The airline announced Monday that it’s adding flights this summer to cities including Edinburgh, Paris, Athens and Rome. 

US-Canada routes were 22% of Air Canada’s passenger revenue in 2024. 

Air Canada focuses on staying “agile,” Sørensen said, maintaining enough flexibility to redeploy capacity when demand shifts. 

Porter Airlines, a competitor to Air Canada, said Monday it has altered its summer schedule so that domestic routes are 80% of its total capacity, up from 75% in its original plan. The airline said it’s making “targeted frequency reductions in select US markets” but that its overall presence on Canada-US routes will still be larger than last summer. Porter has been expanding capacity as it deploys new Embraer E195-E2 jets.

UK-based Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. also warned Monday that ticket sales on flights originating in the US have weakened in recent weeks, while demand from Europe to the US has held up well so far.

The S&P 500 Passenger Airlines Index dropped more than 6% early Monday before paring those losses to a 1.4% decline as of 1:30 p.m. New York time.

Public opinion polls show that a large majority of Canadians have no interest in joining the US and they disapprove of Trump. A poll by Leger Marketing released last week found only 9% of Canadians would like to be part of the US.

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Just after sunrise on Saturday, a satellite set its long-range camera on the city of Mandalay in Myanmar, not far from the epicenter of Friday’s 7.7 magnitude earthquake that devastated the Southeast Asian country’s second-largest city.

The mission was to capture images that, combined with artificial intelligence technology, could help relief organizations quickly assess how many buildings had collapsed or were heavily damaged and where helpers most needed to go.

At first, the high-tech computer vision approach wasn’t working.

“The biggest challenge in this particular case was the clouds,” said Microsoft’s chief data scientist, Juan Lavista Ferres. “There’s no way to see through clouds with this technology.”

The clouds eventually moved and it took a few more hours for another satellite from San Francisco-based Planet Labs to capture the aerial pictures and send them to Microsoft’s philanthropic AI for Good Lab. By then it was already about 11 p.m. Friday at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. A group of Microsoft workers was ready and waiting for the data.

The AI for Good lab has done this kind of AI-assisted damage assessment before, tracking Libya’s catastrophic flooding in 2023 or this year’s wildfires in Los Angeles. But rather than rely on a standard AI computer vision model that could run any visual data, they had to build a customized version specific to Mandalay.

“The Earth is too different, the natural disasters are too different and the imagery we get from satellites is just too different to work in every situation,” Lavista Ferres said. For instance, he said, while fires spread in fairly predictable ways, “an earthquake touches the whole city” and it can be harder to know in the immediate aftermath where help is needed.

Once the AI analysis was complete, it showed 515 buildings in Mandalay with 80% to 100% damage and another 1,524 with between 20% and 80% damage. That showed the widespread gravity of the disaster, but, just as important, it helps pinpoint specific locations of damage.

“This is critical information for teams on the ground,” Lavista Ferres said.

Microsoft cautioned that it “should serve as a preliminary guide and will require on-the-ground verification for a complete understanding.” But in the meantime, the tech company has shared the analysis with aid groups such as the Red Cross.

Planet Labs says its satellites — it has 15 of them orbiting the Earth — have now photographed roughly a dozen locations in Myanmar and Thailand since Friday’s quake.

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• President Donald Trump has changed his tune again on tariffs as investors nervously await a new batch of import taxes to be unveiled on Wednesday. The stock market has had an especially tough March, and a quiet period for earnings has meant bad news out of Washington looms even larger than normal.  

Stocks are set to post their worst quarter in nearly three years as markets wait in fear for President Donald Trump’s next big tariff announcement on Wednesday. The S&P 500 fell sharply after the opening bell, dipping below the 5,500 mark for the first time since September, before bouncing back to pare its losses. The index is down over 5% year to date, its worst three months since plunging 17% in the second quarter of 2022.

Wall Street has especially soured on tech as investors hunt for safer assets amid tariff turmoil. The Nasdaq Composite was down over 1% as of midday Monday and has fallen more than 11% in the first quarter of 2025. Shares of the market’s preeminent AI darling, Nvidia, have shed nearly a quarter of their value as the stock dipped Monday, while Elon Musk’s Tesla is down over 30% this year after its shares also fell. 

Markets had received a boost last week after Trump downplayed expectations for the tariff announcement on April 2, which he has termed “Liberation Day.” The tune from the administration has changed again, however, with the Wall Street Journal reporting over the weekend that a blanket 20% tariff on all imports is on the table. The White House has also pushed back on previous reports that so-called reciprocal tariffs on trading partners might be narrowed, with the president telling reporters Sunday the new taxes will target “all countries.”

Markets famously hate uncertainty, as the saying goes, and Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats have weighed on stocks for months. As Wednesday’s announcement looms, a lack of good news has also made things worse, said ETF and hedge-fund manager Jay Hatfield, CEO of Infrastructure Capital Advisors.

Core to Trump’s economic agenda, he said, is the idea that tariffs will pay for tax cuts elsewhere. While investors have been forced to contend with how higher taxes on imports could result in slower growth and higher prices, there haven’t been as many updates from Washington about reducing the tax burden for individuals or corporate America.

“The bad part is pretty certain,” Hatfield said, “but the good part is not certain.”

Stocks initially rallied to all-time highs after Trump’s election win in November thanks to the president’s promises of tax cuts and deregulation unleashing economic growth. 

“Not because he was going to try to make Canada the 51st state,” Hatfield said.

Seasonality could exacerbate recession fears

Those postelection gains have been more than erased after both the S&P and Nasdaq slid into correction territory in March. Tariff worries have fanned the flames of recession fears. Goldman Sachs now says there is a 35% chance of gross domestic product contracting for two straight quarters, in part because of how heavy import taxes could weigh on consumer spending and continued uncertainty might suppress business investment.

Cuts to the federal workforce, meanwhile, will also impact Friday’s monthly jobs report, and Hatfield would not be surprised if it came in soft. However, that could be bullish for the stock market long-term, he said, if it pushes the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.

He also noted bonds rallied Monday as investors piled into safe-haven assets. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, the benchmark for rates on mortgages and other borrowing costs throughout the economy, now sits at 4.23%, down about 60 basis points from early January.  

Finally, Hatfield also said March is typically a weak month for the stock market, in part owing to a lack of major earnings announcements to combat bad news.

“It’s kind of like waking up in the middle of night,” he said. “You don’t usually wake up euphoric. You wake up with your fears.”

Plenty of investors are hoping their tariff nightmare ends soon.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com