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Well, it’s happened. According to xe.com as of 10:08am PST this morning, the Canadian dollar is officially worth more than the American dollar. Sure, the loonie only out-values the greenback by 3/4 of a penny, but it’s a momentous day for the Canadian dollar, because only a few years ago, the exchange rate was closer to 40%. It used to be that if you took an American dollar into a bank and asked for Canadian funds, that buck turned into a buck-forty of our “funny money.”

As a Canadian, some may assume that this is a happy day for me. It’s not. While taking a vacation to the United States has suddenly gotten a heck of a lot cheaper, you also have to realize that I’m taking a rather heavy pay cut as well.

All of the major advertising networks pay in US funds — Adsense, Text Link Ads, ReviewMe, and so on — as do a few of my freelance writing clients. Logging into my PayPal account, I find that the US money, sure enough, is worth less than Canadian. Instead of the US dollar number getting bigger when translated to Canadian, it gets smaller by about $100.

And it sucks that PayPal doesn’t let me extract those US funds as US funds into a Canadian bank account, even if it’s a US dollar account. I need to open an American bank account… anyone know what the process would be for a non-US resident?