Market participants have tended to focus on the size of the Program, but let me underline here that the direct objective has not been quantitative expansion; rather, the measure seeks to encourage a decline in longer-term interest rates and various risk premiums resulting in quantitative expansion.
1 They appear to be systematic in nature, as opposed to chance occurrences, and Bank researchers suspect that they reflect differences in the way core inflation is defined, as well as structural differences in  1  Serious research at the Bank of Canada on alternative measures of core inflation began with the work of Laflèche (1997), Crawford et al. (1998), Hogan et al.