Word: canadians
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Some claim the Canadian dollar rose against the greenback because the U.S. dollar has been dragged down by government budget deficits, a long and costly war, and a yawning gap between the value of imports and exports. True enough. But the link between the loonie and the worldwide boom in commodities had even more to do with it. If you graph the value of the Canadian dollar with the prices of oil, natural gas, certain metals and grain, "it's pretty hard to tell which is which, down to every little squiggle," says TD Bank Financial Group chief economist...
...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...
...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's cavernous ground-floor retail space is almost empty. As the rising dollar made Canadian products more expensive around the world, Canada shed nearly 100,000 manufacturing jobs in 12 months. "We went from [being] the lowest-cost producer of vehicles around the world for GM, Ford and Chrysler to probably one of the highest," says Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers Union...
...tourist hubs like Niagara Falls and Whistler, businesses report fewer visitors. Americans made about half as many trips north in 2007 as they did in 2003. Natural-resource industries, for which prices haven't risen substantially, also suffered. "In the month of November there wasn't a single Canadian sawmill that made money," says Russ Taylor, president of forestry consultancy International Wood Markets Group. Nova Scotia's biggest Christmas-tree grower shipped a quarter of a million balsam firs this year, mostly to U.S. stores. Next year they're shutting up shop in Canada altogether, says Mac Kirk at Kirk...
Down to earth It didn't last. In November, the great northern diver dipped again, bringing the dollar back below $1 U.S. Today, the major Canadian banks predict commodity prices will fall more as the U.S. economy cools, landing the loonie somewhere around 95 U.S. cents at the end of 2008. But few predict a return to the low, low loonie levels that Canadians knew just one year ago, and that means the structural shift in Canada's economy - with growing differences between sectors and between geographic regions - seems set to continue. "It's almost like a tale...