Come on, little buck, you can do it

Today's exchange rate is a depressing 1.00::0.962, in favor of Canada (of course).

I'm not trying to turn this into a political or economics blog, because I'm just not capable of that sort of thing. But I did learn today that the increase in Canadian prices is due to there being a distributory "middleman". The idea is (in typical Canada-wants-recognition style) that every U.S. company has to have a specific Canadian "branch" that imports most of the products but spends extra on the packaging and distributing, so that the product can then be written in poorly translated Franglais (ex: Ketchup="Ketchup") and be covered in maple leafs. This additional packaging jacks the price up. Add on the provincial and government taxes, and you can see why we're in such a fix over here. Now that the dollar is in surplus, you would think the problem would be solved (or less bad), but such is not the case. Also, Canada's biggest trade partner of exports is the U.S., and now the states aren't really as interested in buying Canadian. So, like before, nobody wins, and we're getting shafted all the more.