Word: canadas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...heights the loonie reached, for the economic upheaval (both good and bad) it brought, and for the rare bird's-eye view that Canada got, looking down on its best friend and biggest rival in the world - where, let us not forget, people rarely fail to find the term loonie hilarious to begin with - the lofty loonie is TIME's Canadian Newsmaker of the Year...
...common loon, a black and white water bird with a tapered bill and a haunting call, became a symbol of Canada's money in 1987: the year Canada minted its first one-dollar coins with the now-iconic bird on one face. It is a fitting national emblem. The loon is found across much of the country, and moves impressively both in air and under water. Its aquatic skills in particular are so good that outside North America, the bird is known as the great northern diver...
...Canada's currency did dive after the dollar coin was introduced - all through the 1990s and into the early part of this century. January 2002 was the bottom. At it's all-time low then, the Canadian dollar was worth just less than 62 U.S. cents. Recovery since then, dramatic and steady, began with something as dull as a rise in oil prices. With that, the laborious process of drawing viscous bitumen out of Alberta's oil sands became ever more viable. Massive shovels churned the earth, digging up the tons of sand needed to produce each barrel...
...year in change And so with glowing hearts, Canadians saw their dollar rise - few failing to appreciate that, in some way or another, the Canadian economy was smoking its U.S. counterpart. Growth in Western Canada had been blistering for years. Construction boomed. Across the country, employment rose. Toronto Blue Jays CEO Paul Godfrey told a U.S. radio station in October that each one-cent increase in the loonie was saving him $600,000 a year in U.S.-dollar player salaries...
There was a downside, of course. Across from Detroit in Windsor, Ont. - at Canada's busiest border crossing - the plumped-up loonie did not bring such good humor. Windsor is one of the few urban centers in Canada - almost all of them in Ontario - where unemployment has risen since 2002. Gurmit Singh Bains drives his taxi along the riverside. "It's like a ghost town," he says. "The whole economy is down: hotels, restaurants, everything." The waterfront DaimlerChrysler Canada headquarters opened to much fanfare there in 2002, when the city's auto-manufacturing industry was red-hot. Today, the building...