Rarely employed outside of Japan before the crisis, central banks in a number of advanced economies have undertaken variants of quantitative easing in recent years as conventional policies have reached their limits.
The positives would be more gradual, taking the form of stronger consumer spending, both here and in the U.S., and increased non-resource exports, because of stronger U.S. spending and a lower Canadian dollar. These positives have been slow to emerge, but we can see them working. Export subsectors that are usually sensitive to exchange rate movements have been outperforming.