My Prediction

I'm about to doze off, and it's looking like Bush will either win or it will be about a week before they sort Ohio out. (another scenario is that bush wins Ohio, kerry wins all the gore states, and flips Nevada and new Hampshire, which is looking likely. This will give a 269-269 tie as things stand right now)

Anyway, if Bush does win, the Canadian dollar is going to reach $.92USD within two years. And if he continues on the same course after 2006, the dollar will break even within 4 years.

Remember that it has changed by this amount already since bush has started his awful economic policies 4 years ago. As far as how a Bush presidency will affect Canada, the net effect might actually be good. Canada is currently attracting many more graduate students and research scientists who no longer feel safe in the United States, and are not seeing the research opportunities there as there used to be.

With Canada continuing to run budget surpluses while the US continues to run record deficits, this will actually have a positive effect on Canada's economy. When a government has to borrow money, it is competing against you and me for the banks' business. Therefore the banks can charge consumers more to process loans because they don't need our business. When a government runs surpluses, the banks are no longer able to profit off of interest from the government borrowing money from them, and therefore they must compete for consumers' business.

Given that the US doesn't want to borrow money in other countries' currencies, least not Euros which look to continue to go up, this will leave Canadian consumers in a much better position to borrow money than Americans. This will improve the investment environment in Canada, and will propel our economy further ahead, raising more revenue for the government. This then becomes a self-propelling cycle where our economy will continue to grow as the US collapses under its own debt. (this is not even to mention the massive amounts of consumer debt the average American has now amassed.) This is sort of like what happened to Ireland in the last 10 years. England's economy stagnated under Thatcher and Major, they got involved in costly financial blunders from privatization and fighting a war against Argentina over a few rocks. Meanwhile Ireland became a full-fledged participant in the EU, and was a much better place to do business than the UK. Also their population, which enjoyed much better public education than the UK, became the most sought-after workforce in Europe, especially with their economy more fully integrated with the other EU countries.

I can see Canada becoming to the US what Ireland has become to the UK, moving from a dependent little follower to a beneficiary to their large neighbour's mistakes. Ireland's quality of life is now well higher than the UK's, and Canada's has been higher than the US for decades, so the difference may become even stronger.