The third and final thing I will spend some time on is the path forward. I hope to give you a sense of the things the Bank will be monitoring closely—the signs we will be looking for—to guide our decisions in the months ahead. Monetary policy takes time to affect the economy.
When I appeared before you last April, there was still a high degree of uncertainty in the global economy related to the 1997-98 financial crisis in emerging markets and the associated fall in world commodity prices. And because of these difficulties, the pace of economic activity in Canada had slowed.