Two leading Bay Street strategists expect the Canadian dollar’s steady climb over the last two months will start to top out at about 80 cents US, a level it flirted with on Monday amid signs of an increasingly robust economy.

The loonie, which ended Monday with an average trading price of 79.92 cents US, up 0.23 of a cent, has packed on more than seven cents since early May -- a surge largely fueled by the vote of confidence earlier this month from the Bank of Canada in the form of the first hike to its benchmark rate in close to seven years.

The bank’s increasingly hawkish tone was bolstered Monday by the latest economic outlook from the International Monetary Fund. It’s closely watched quarterly update calls for Canada’s economy to spurt up by 2.5 per cent in 2017, a rise from the 1.9 per cent projected in its spring outlook.

That news dovetailed with data from Statistics Canada indicating wholesale trade sales rose to a record high of $61.6 billion in May, driven by a jump in vehicle sales and agricultural supplies.

Shaun Osborne, chief currency strategist at Scotiabank, said he does not expect the dollar to rise much more despite the rapid run-up as of late. He does admit, however, that the loonie’s momentum caught many observers off guard.

“It’s been a bit like the Energizer Bunny story for the Canadian dollar over the past few weeks. I think this rally has gone a lot quicker and a lot further than a lot of people, including ourselves, could have expected,” he told the Business News Network.

Osborne warns Canada should not accept too much credit for the soaring loonie, pointing to the weight of economic weakness and mounting political uncertainty south of the border on the U.S. dollar.

“The political situation in the U.S. has been a big drag on the U.S. dollar. We just don’t know where that is going to go in the long term,” he said. “We certainly, more broadly, have an increasingly negative view of the US dollar from a trading point of view.”

The loonie has benefited from a US dollar sell-off as the White House struggles to deliver on its economic agenda.

“If you throw in all the problems that the Trump administration has, it doesn’t really look like a rosy outlook for the US dollar,” said CIBC Capital Markets executive director of macro strategy Bipan Rai.

He thinks the greenback’s woes may be enough for the U.S. Federal Reserve to pause plans for increasing the cost of borrowing and starting to unload its massive US$4.5 trillion balance sheet.

“We do think that September is going to be the meeting where they announce their outlook for how they are going to unwind their balance sheet. And then potentially, they wait until December for their next rate hike,” Rai said.

Osborne figures the loonie is unlikely to pick up further steam without a significant climb in oil prices, or the Bank of Canada “ratcheting up its rhetoric on the rate front.”

“(At) 80 cents US, we think we are close to fully priced at this point,” Osborne said. “We were thinking of 80 cents US as more of a 2018 story not sort of mid-2017, so it’s come a long, long way very, very quickly.”

Rai said he was equally surprised by the loonie’s recent gains. He’s calling for Canada’s currency to hit 81 cents US, before retreating to a still formidable 77 cent level.

“Put simply, the Canadian data has been on fire, apart from inflation, to a certain degree. Add in the U.S. dollar bearishness and we’ve got the ingredients for a stronger loonie,” he said.

With a report from BNN’s Jon Erlichman