Tiff Macklem: Monetary policy report and the outlook for the Canadian economy

Opening statement by Mr Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada, before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, Ottawa, 26 November 2020.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Good afternoon, Chair and committee members. Senior Deputy Governor Wilkins and I are pleased to be back to discuss our latest Monetary Policy Report (MPR) and the outlook for the Canadian economy.

The main message is that we will get through this pandemic, but it's going to be a tough slog, and the Bank of Canada will be with Canadians every step of the way.

Let me briefly summarize our outlook for the economy, as set out in our MPR.

Our projection is highly conditional on our assumptions about the virus. Simply put, the health of the economy really depends on how the pandemic evolves.

We assumed that authorities won't need to reinstate the sort of extensive and widespread containment measures we saw in the spring. But we can expect successive waves of the virus to require localized restrictions. We also assumed that vaccines and effective treatments will be widely available by mid-2022. Since we released the MPR four weeks ago, news about vaccines has been encouraging, while virus cases have continued to rise and containment measures have escalated.