Word: dollarize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sooner or later the politicians were bound to weigh in. On Nov. 7, Stephen Harper announced he was "concerned" about the dollar's "unprecedented" rise, an unusual Prime Ministerial foray on to Bank of Canada turf. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty met with the PM the next day, calling for lower interest rates and a federal contribution to a $1.1 billion jobs fund for struggling Ontario manufacturers. (Harper made no promises.) The same day, the Quebec Premier was demanding a loonie summit with all the provincial Premiers. (One is now scheduled for January). Just six weeks after the loonie achieved parity...
...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...
...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'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...
...reached $1.10 U.S., the currency's value swerved and swung over a three-cent range in a single day - a difference that for the Blue Jays, at least, means most of the annual salary for slugger Alex Rios. "Volatile," Bank of Canada governor-to-be Mark Carney calls the dollar fluctuations. No kidding...
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...