Thank you for inviting me to this Congress, and for choosing to spend part of your weekend listening to the discussion on this important topic. The question before us sounds straightforward: “should Canada adopt the U.S. dollar?” But the issues are complicated. I will not pretend that I can cover all the nuances of this topic in my allotted time.
So I am running the risk that I may oversimplify matters. I should also say that I want to stick to economic facts and arguments. There is, of course, a big political dimension to the question, but I will leave that to the politicians. I want to confine my arguments today to the field of economics.