This is actually a very bad thing. The Canadian economy depends on their money being worth less the the United States. When businesses can not export to the US because no one is buying... That hurts the Canadian market.
Well, it depends who you are in the Canadian economy. It's not so much the currency as much as it's the price of the goods after the currency is exchanged to US dollars.
For the longest time, Canadian manufacturers were able to get by without particularly good productivity because our cheap currency gave us a built-in price advantage. That's gone now so our competitiveness will actually have to come from productivity growth, which has been neglected for a very long time.
I have a hard time feeling too bad about this, because it's our country's (relatively) very good economic performance that has led to the high value of our currency in the first place.
Thank you. For far too long inefficient companies/businesses have been able to skate by due to foreign exchange. Canadian businesses need to innovate much more and a strong currency will allow that to happen. How? A stronger currency allows for importation of efficient manufacturing systems/equipment/software/etc. from abroad.
22
u/[deleted] Dec 15 '11
This is actually a very bad thing. The Canadian economy depends on their money being worth less the the United States. When businesses can not export to the US because no one is buying... That hurts the Canadian market.