"If listing on ebay.ca in Canadian dollars for our particular items boosted Canadian sales to a point that mattered "
It does. Try it. Your Canadian sales will increase.
"How do you get them to show in Canadian dollars?"
???
If the currency of the listing is Cdn$, they will show in Cdn$ on eBay.ca
and in Cdn$ with the approximate US$ equivalent on eBay.com
For example:
on eBay.ca: http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=390920388254&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT
on eBay.com http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=390920388254&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT
"might be losing a whole lot of US buyers"
That could be true if Canadian sellers had lots of sales from the American market.
However, these boards are full of messages from Canadian sellers telling us they can hardly sell to the USA for a wide variety of reason.
What I am suggesting is to try it if your sales are slow (as many sellers claim).
If your sales are booming, you are doing something right, your market loves your stuff and you do not need to change a thing..
eBay.ca staff current opinion:
"Although we don't have any recent publicly available data and nor do we have any of this broken down by category, we are 100% confident that listing in USD is a far better option for any seller who offers shipping to the USA."
We are all entitled to an opinion, are we not?
@holdmygold2 wrote:rose: All of my listings and especially those priced over $200 should have very strong and special appeal to Canadians.
WHY you ask? 🙂
Canadian buyers risk getting dinged for taxes over $20 (which I don't add) AND now there's the GSP to contend with when they buy from the US, and yet they continue to do so.
That's why I don't understand my lack of Canadian buyers.
I have enough to go around for both sites and can easily rotate if there is some reason to do so.
Thing Is: I don't buy that listing on .ca in Canadian $s works either, but I'm more than willing to try once again.............. but so far the listings look exactly the same.
Well, you sound as if you're in a fortunate position if you have items that will appeal particularly to Canadians, as well as items of general appeal.
You have a good point about the $20 import limit and the GSP. I've wondered the same things about why my efforts to draw in Canadian buyers haven't worked either (free shipping, special discounts for Cdns, etc.).
With the GSP though, I think a lot of Canadian eBay buyers have learned to ask US sellers to opt out, but I'm sure it must be having an affect on the number of Canadians that US sellers get. The $20 import limit is a bit of a moving target -- I've regularly had parcels valued at over $100 come in from the US completely tax-free. In fact it seems these days that CBSA doesn't bother much with anything under $150.
I think there's something else at play here, and I still believe it's the fact that Canadians traditionally see the US market as their "go-to" place to shop, whether online or in person (if they're close to the US border). How do we change that? That is the $60 million question every Canadian retailer has been trying to answer for the last 100 years! 
If you have a line of products that will appeal to Canadians in particular, it might be worth a try to list them in $Cdn for a while -- I'd be interested to know your results after a few weeks, although it won't make much difference in my own situation. I'm getting a lot of exposure in the US market, so much so that it wouldn't be an advantage to me to turn away from it at the moment.
It only takes a few minutes to confirm that "toby" lists and sells in Canadian dollars, items of interest to a worldwide audience, mostly the younger crowd I would guess. And his sales volume appears to be just fine! 
@holdmygold2 wrote:rose: I didn't mean that my items are any different from those of others.
What I meant is that ALL higher priced items in Canada have special appeal to Canadians if sellers are not charging tax because of potential import issues.
OK, I see what you're getting at. I think it would depend on what you mean by higher-priced. As I said, I do a fair amount of buying from the US (not always on eBay), and I rarely get anything "dinged" by CBSA that's under $150.
If you're thinking of things worth more than, say, $200 US, you could be right. However, many of my US buyers have told me that items I've sold that were significantly over their $200 limit still got through without duties/taxes.
So, as a "thought experiment", what might be the effect of listing, let's say an item that you value at $500(Cdn) in $Cdn? I suppose it depends mostly on the demand you believe will be there in the market in Canada.
My experience has been that there are more buyers in the US with that kind of money to spend than there are in Canada. Even as a proportion, population-wise, that has to be the case. However, if you listed the item at the present time, when the $Cdn is around $0.95 to $0.98 US, then your $500 Cdn listing might look pretty good to US buyers -- at least those who don't mind seeing the exchange conversion shown on the listing. So it's possible you could end up actually attracting more US buyers when listing high-priced items in $Cdn -- if the US buyers get past the unfamiliarity factor.
Canadian buyers, on the other hand, as you say, would take import charges into account, and that $500 Cdn price might look pretty good. But here again, I think it depends on the availability of the same kind of item from US sellers, and at what price. If a US seller could offer a comparable item for $400 with comparable shipping costs, then there would be little to choose between the two. Except -- which item would the Canadian buyer be likely to see first?
And that's what I think the problem is -- Canadians aren't looking to Canadian sellers first and foremost on eBay. That's where eBay.ca could do some work (IMHO)!
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