Maximum sustainable employment.... It would be lovely if it were easy to just give you a number. I can't give you a number. It's really a concept. What is meant by “maximum sustainable” is the maximum level of employment the economy could sustain without creating inflationary pressures. That's what's meant by “sustainable”.
The economy, a couple years ago, was very overheated. We had a very high level of employment. We had a lot of job shortages, but it was not sustainable. It was creating inflation. Now we have some softness in the labour market. We could have more employment without creating inflation. That's an important reason we're lowering interest rates.
We do spend a lot of time looking at the labour market. You can't summarize the labour market in a single statistic. It's not just the unemployment rate. It's the participation rate. It's younger workers. It's older workers. It's men. It's women. It's immigrants. It's students. You have to look at the diversity.
Right now, the slack, the weakness in the labour market is very concentrated in newcomers to Canada and youth, as you've already highlighted. You have to look at the overall health of the labour market. That does factor in an important way into our monetary policy decisions. Our primary objective—and the mandate is very clear—is price stability, but price stability or low inflation go hand in hand with strong employment because, if you're missing jobs, you're missing incomes, you're missing spending and inflation is going to come down. We do look at that very closely. We know that if we don't keep inflation well anchored, nothing is going to work well in the economy, so that's our primary objective.