Finance committee  Or bank deposits.

Finance committee  Competitiveness is a very broad kind of concept. Economists usually measure it in terms of unit labour cost measured in a single currency. That's the narrowest version of it. Of course, from a company's point of view, anything that costs them money is part of their competitivenes

Finance committee  We don't comment on individual measures, but what we do is take the budget in its entirety and seek out or distill just what its macro effect will be.

Finance committee  Oh, I see. Well, what happened since January was that everybody had a budget. So we update the fiscal stance for all the provinces and the federal government together in one line. What is that adding to the economy? I'd say the biggest contributor to that difference is the Ontari

Finance committee  Our primary source on questions like these is our BOS, our business outlook survey, which is quarterly and quite thorough. Companies for quite some time have been talking about the uncertainty around NAFTA giving them pause in their investment decisions. A pause is one thing; ano

Finance committee  It's true that one can't really build too much more potential output without the people. That process I described of higher investment usually means an expansion in a company, and therefore also more jobs. It's true that the statistics on vacancies—and 470,000 is a lot of vacan

Finance committee  No. Our forecast is for inflation to be 2% in the window that we have some influence over, which is 18 months to two years from now. Over this year, it will be above 2% because of the short-term factors that we've identified, primarily energy costs. Those things will come out in

Finance committee  That's correct. There are, and Canada is taking advantage. I'm quite certain that our export growth is higher today than it would be without those extra opportunities. However, it's still a little on the lacklustre side because of our uncertainty around our principal trade partne

Finance committee  Yes, we track the results of that, and note that it seems to have a temporary effect in B.C. We're still watching the experiment, or the change in Toronto. Also, the experiences in other countries with similar situations is helping us to understand that. When the laws of demand

Finance committee  We don't do that ourselves, but we are acknowledging that the economy's potential has evolved in a positive way since one year ago. We do a full job on that only once a year, in the springtime, for our April MPR. What we need to take into account, then, are the latest long-term

Finance committee  Yes. We have access to very granular data on household borrowing, on mortgages. We're able to model this quite closely. Where we begin to get more uncertainty in the picture is with how people actually respond. We can do the arithmetic on it, but the economics are more complex,

Finance committee  We track those data, as everyone does. In terms of the actual forecast, there is a degree of judgment because B-20 is not the sort of thing that changes often, so it's not as easily modelled, but it's modelled in the way we've described, on a granular level, and then scaled up to

Finance committee  Something like that.

Finance committee  We have three things happening to the housing market at the same time. One is that interest rates have risen since last year, and so we're watching for that effect. That would have a longer-term effect on the market. Second is that we have the change to B-20, which would also hav

Finance committee  That's the one that we have in our forecast. When we go through.... There's a table in the monetary policy report, which I don't have at my fingertips. It's about a 0.2% contribution to GDP as a baseline. This of course is less than we've had in the past because of the moderation