Canada

To your question about exchanging for travel etc.... huh? Like your conversion sums are basically both just saying the exchange rate is 61.8% either way, there's no difference in the rate of exchange, so no, I don't really see the difference. If I'm going to a foreign country, I exchange for that country's currency. I see no practical purpose for doing an intermediary step. If you're trying to "play the exchange market", you can try to exchange into various currencies if you think they'll fluctuate in relative strength, but you generally need a lot of money to make anything with that approach, and it's pretty risky. For that, you'd also need to hold on to the different currency types for longer than just a vacation or whatever. Ie. Canada's currency typically floats around 70% of USD. If you see a period where it's trading at a high rate, say 75%, you could exchange $10k CAD into $7500 USD. Then if the exchange rate dips down to like 68%, you could exchange that $7500 USD into $11030 CAD for a profit of $1030 CAD. Timing that sort of thing is pretty dicey though, and making significant money from it would require investing a significant amount. There are various institutional players that do that sort of thing though -- banks for example, will often play the currency exchanges to try and generate a bit of revenue.

In terms of the strength of various currencies, it depends on things like international trade / demand for that currency. People in the thread commenting on the continued strength of the USD, for example, don't seem to have registered that the US/Kissinger (I think), back in like the 80s or something, convinced a bunch of the big oil nations to only settle oil transactions in USD. One reason BRICS is so hated by the USA, is that they're basically a group of countries who don't use USD for oil trades. But generally there's huge demand for the USD as a result, globally, even with president pant shitter in charge. That is shifting a chunk, evidenced by the reduction in nations holding USD as a reserve, France repatriating their gold holdings, etc etc. It's not a fast process to excise the states, but it's underway, and will likely lead to more volatility in their currency (though it'll still be worth more than CAD in general, due to the relative sizes of the two nations and productivity outputs).

Having a lower dollar value in Canada is partly a result of the population size / productivity, but it's also partly intentional as it generally helps with exports. Eg. A USD can buy more lumber in Canada, than it can in the USA, so they're enticed to buy Canadian lumber. Or like our Film industry -- our crews labour is cheaper than the labour in the USA, so they film a lot of shows up north. And, realistically with our size difference, without that enticement they likely wouldn't come north, they wouldn't trade that product/service/labour with us, and those industries would likely contract due to decreased demand. See BC's closing saw mills as an example -- if we don't have enough population to maintain demand for a ton of lumber products (and/or we import all we need from elsewhere for cheaper than we could get them locally), and foreign interests don't want them due to trade issues/tariffs etc, there's no point keeping mills open. Govts will apply things like tariffs to try and force local markets to sustain local industries, which is what the US is trying to do across the board these days (particularly in manufacturing, as the govt views the manufacturing gap between the USA and China as a huge security weakness I reckon), Sectors that get protected are typically ones defined as critical industries by the govt, and are defined as such in large part because they're viewed as critical to the ongoing sustenance of a country/state/group of people. So like almost every state protects their financial industry/banks, because having control over the currency/flow of currency trades within a country is pretty important for the country to function -- if a foreign nation could flip a switch and suddenly none of your people could exchange currency for goods, and you couldn't collect taxes, you're sorta screwed as a country. That's another big reason there's a push for things like Data Sovereignty amongst western democracies these days, and you see France moving to Linux. The US had been so trusted for so long, that they'd been given a lot of tech in-roads to critical industries -- exposing countries like Canada to HUGE risk from US aggression, even without 'boots on the ground'. That leverage/control, is also why the US is so belligerent towards any data sovereignty movements -- they have power/control of captured nations, and don't want to relinquish it. They view other nations taking back control/autonomy as a national security risk for them, as it translates to those other countries being able to say 'no' to the US's demands with less fear of repercussions. But I digress ;p