Industry committee  Well, I was trained as an economist, so yes, I believe that the market should work and that there shouldn't be a lot of intervention in the marketplace. Making markets work better provides dividends now and into the future. Ways to reduce the natural rate of unemployment would

Industry committee  We did some research for Industry Canada a few years ago looking at the appreciation of the Canadian dollar at that point. We looked at different scenarios of how the economy adjusts to these sorts of shocks. In one of the scenarios we did for them, we purposely made the adjustme

Industry committee  It's labour mobility, flow of goods, capital mobility. No barriers—

Industry committee  —to people, capital, or goods and services would be helpful. That would be a major step forward. We still have too many internal barriers within Canada.

Industry committee  Certainly it's a conundrum for manufacturers in southern Ontario and pork producers and those who have not had the run-up in commodity prices. The Canadian dollar has been driven largely by commodity prices. The correlation between the exchange rate and the price of oil, up unti

Industry committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak today. Let me say that the impact on the Canadian economy from the appreciation of the Canadian dollar is going to be far worse this time than earlier appreciations, for five reasons. First of all, in previous periods the U.S. economy was quit

Finance committee  No, that would be suicide. You don't want to have a directive from the finance department to the Bank of Canada to lower interest rates. That's not a very wise policy.

Finance committee  As I mentioned earlier, the negative economic impact is larger when the price and wage system is less flexible. It doesn't matter whether it's an exchange rate shock or some other type of shock, encouraging the flexibility in your wage price system is helpful in mitigating the si

Finance committee  Exactly.

Finance committee  Yes, I agree with that. It takes a while for the full impact of a rising Canadian dollar to feed through the economy and have its peak impact on output and jobs. We did a study for Industry Canada a few years ago, which presumably you can get access to, that examined the previous

Finance committee  In terms of the Canadian dollar and its impact on the Canadian economy, it's important to keep the rise in context. As has been mentioned, commodity prices have been going up and the U.S. dollar has been going down, both of which have forced the Canadian dollar up. There is rea