We appreciate the opportunity to meet with your committee, which we usually do twice a year, following the release of our Monetary Policy Report. We believe that these meetings help us to keep Members of Parliament and, through you, all Canadians, informed of the Bank's views on the economy and about the objective of monetary policy and the actions we take to achieve it.
When Paul and I appeared before the Finance Committee last October, we noted then that the outlook for growth in the Canadian economy had been revised down slightly from earlier expectations. In our latest Monetary Policy Report, which we released last Thursday, we noted that Canada's economic growth did indeed slow, but recently, inflation has been higher than expected.