9 But it is only recently that Bank staff have formally incorporated a separate commodity sector into our main projection model, ToTEM. In contrast to the Bank's previous model, which treated economic activity as a single aggregate, 10 ToTEM - which stands for Terms of Trade Economic Model - makes explicit the distinction between raw materials or commodities, and manufactured goods.
This distinction is crucial for two reasons. First, commodity production represents a sizable proportion, some 11 per cent, of Canadian GDP, 11 and commodity exports account for nearly 45 per cent of the dollar value of our total exports.