Let me address the question of whether the Canadian dollar is rising or the U.S. dollar is falling. I think there are a lot of inaccuracies in the general discourse on that subject.
The U.S. dollar is falling globally. If you measure the value of the U.S. currency against the trade-weighted index of the major countries it trades with, and you weight each of its trading partners according to its importance in that bilateral trade, the U.S. dollar has fallen by about 20% over the last four years. The Canadian dollar has risen against the U.S. dollar by 60% during that same time period. That's a three-to-one ratio. In other words, our dollar has risen three times as much as the U.S. dollar has fallen. You could say that one-third of the problem is that the U.S. dollar is weak, but two-thirds of the problem is the uniquely Canadian problem that our currency is strong because of this overheated resource sector and the indirect links onto our currency.
In terms of how you would actually bring the dollar back to the low eighties, I think it's quite sensible. The most common benchmark that economists use to evaluate the fair value of a currency is what's called “purchasing power parity”; that is, a currency should be at a level so that a given amount of money can buy as much in one country as it does in another country, after adjusting for price levels and exchange rates. That purchasing power parity level is in the low eighties. It's around 83¢ to 84¢. I think it's a question of our dollar being driven away from that value by the pressures in financial markets.
I'm sorry for going on so long.