I'll try to be quick. It's an important question.
To bring it together, Dutch disease means technically that you have a spike in activity because of a spike in the price of a product that then goes down. Our view is that commodity prices are going to stay elevated for some time, so we're not seeing a spike; we're seeing a natural adjustment. That's the first point.
Second, in that environment it's better to have commodities than not. The question is how well you develop them in a sustainable way to capture the most value added.
Third, it's important that we have the adjustments in the economy we talked about earlier. That means partly labour moving and it's also capturing more of the value added, as I said.
Fourth, there are tremendous opportunities for Canadian manufacturing. Some of those opportunities are easier to take advantage of because of where the currency is. As Mr. Macklem said a moment ago, there's the advantage of importing machinery and equipment to build productivity and build up new markets. We've detailed in other speeches some of the opportunities that exist for our firms from digital commerce, big data, the changing nature of work, resource productivity, and other aspects. Those opportunities are there.
What's important is that our economy continues to adjust to the broader forces in the global economy. In our view, those broader forces are commodity prices being elevated for some time; the transformation in terms of the relative importance of emerging markets; and a United States that is not as strong as it used to be. I choose all those words advisedly. It's not that the United States is terminally wounded or anything like that, but it is going through a multi-year process of rebuilding and adjusting to the aftermath of the crisis. That means a U.S. economy that grows more like 2% to 2.5% each year instead of the 3% to 3.5% we became used to.
All of those are broader forces. Domestic demographics is the final one we need our economy to adjust to in order to continue to build prosperity. The contribution of the Bank of Canada will be price stability, as defined by the inflation control agreement with the Government of Canada.