Thank you for your question.
Let me talk a bit about the data and this “technical recession” label.
When there is a lot going on in the economy, as there is right now, and there are things pulling different parts of the economy in different directions, you're going to get some noise in the data.
The first thing I would say is that we want to be careful not to over-rotate on any one number, on any one indicator. Two quarters of annualized contraction in GDP does meet one definition of a recession, but the simple fact that you have to put the term “technical” in front of it tells you that you need to look past that one indicator. You need to look at employment. You maybe need to look at some of the leading indicators. We know, for example, that the flash data—flash is the early warning—on GDP for April tell us that there's been a bit of a rebound. We need to be careful not to put too much weight on any one indicator. Let me just start there.
As for your question about what the bank can do to respond to this, we'll be making our next decision in just over a week from Wednesday. We'll be starting our deliberations on that decision later this week. I'm not going to prejudge those deliberations, but we'll be taking in all of the current economic data, including last week's data. We'll have some more data later this week on the labour market. All of that will be factored in as we think about what our next monetary policy decision is.