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Theory and history say the two-year, 20% depreciation of the Canadian dollar should kickstart a factory revival. Yet that relationship — weaker loonie, stronger manufacturing — may be as broken as a Windsor assembly line.

“This whole notion that a weaker currency is going to be good for exports is going to take a lot longer than people think,” said David Woo, head of global rates and currencies research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York.

Just ask Curtis Appleyard. The Windsor native lost his job at Ford Motor Co.’s engine-assembly line seven years ago. He headed to the Cayman Islands, where he tended bars and ran nightclubs for half a decade. He returned to Windsor in 2013 aiming to land another manufacturing job.

Appleyard’s hopes soared when he heard almost 1,000 Ford jobs might be coming back to the city. When Ford opted to build its new engines in Mexico, Appleyard finally pulled the plug on manufacturing and decided to sell insurance instead.

‘No Security’

“I know that manufacturing is no security now,” said Appleyard, 39, in an interview at his girlfriend’s Windsor bungalow. “I had to do something.”

Like tens of thousands of other former factory workers, Appleyard ended up in the services industry, which, even more than energy production, has kept Canada’s economy ticking while manufacturing crumbled.

Manufacturing employment fell to 1.71 million in 2010, the lowest since at least 1976. It remains at that level four years later, even with the weaker loonie.