I appreciate that you are sharing the concerns and the perspectives of your constituents. We also survey Canadians. We do hear directly from Canadians, and that is an important input into our monetary policy decisions.
At our last meeting a couple of weeks ago, we did discuss when it would be appropriate to reduce our policy interest rate. As I outlined in the opening statement, we were certainly encouraged by the progress. We do see renewed downward momentum in underlying inflation. For a while, it had kind of stalled. We do see renewed downward momentum.
If you go back to what we said in January and March, we indicated then that we were looking for further and sustained easing in underlying inflation. What we concluded a couple of weeks ago was that we have seen further easing. What we're really looking for now is for assurance that it is sustained.
The message to Canadians is that we are getting closer. We are seeing what we need to see. We just need to be confident that it will be sustained.
We're very conscious that we don't want to keep monetary policy this restrictive for longer than we have to. On the other hand, getting inflation down as much as we have has been a hard-fought battle. We don't want to cut too early or too quickly and jeopardize that progress. We are trying to balance those two risks.
We're going to take our next decision on, I think, June 4. Then we have another one in July and another one in September. We take our decisions at the decision date, based on the best available information we have at the time.
I'm not going to predict what we're going to do at each decision. We'll do our best for Canadians when we get there.