Reader agrees Canada has Dutch Disease
Letter to the editor
Dear Editor;
Between 2002 and 2011, the Canadian dollar’s average exchange rate skyrocketed to 101 American cents from 64 cents. The loonie gained value largely because of an enhanced foreign appetite for Canadian assets, profitable due to the high price of oil and a boost from corporate tax cuts.
Canada is unique among major oil-exporting countries in having virtually no limitations on foreign ownership of the non-renewable resource itself. Oil prices are correlated to 86% of the variation in the dollar.
Today manufacturing represents just 10 per cent of all employment in Canada down from a peak of 16 per cent in 2000. Economic analyses from universities, banks and international organizations indicate that non-competitiveness as a result of higher exchange rates, also known as “Dutch disease”, caused much of the sharp decline in Canadian manufacturing employment over the past decade. From 2004 to 2008, more than one in seven Canadian manufacturing jobs, nearly 322,000, disappeared.
Christy Clark and Stephen Harper purport to be good economic managers, but their rash promotion of unsustainable raw exports has greatly damaged our economy at the expense of Canadian workers across the country.
Larry Kazdan,
Vancouver, B.C.
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Tags: Christy Clark, Stephen Harper
Category: Opinion
