It’s going to be a very big week in Canadian economics: Today is the day the Bank of Canada has their mandate to target inflation between one and three percent at an average of two percent gets renewed, with some additional language around employment in there (but not a dual mandate). Then Tuesday will be the government’s fiscal update, which isn’t expected to announce too many new things because there simply isn’t time for a budget implementation bill to accompany it. And then Wednesday, Statistics Canada will release the inflation figures for November, and it there remains a possibility it could go higher still before being expected to cool down by mid-next year. Because it’s largely about supply chains, and as the former governor of the Bank of Canada keeps reminding us, it’s not about the political situation or fiscal policy. The counterfactual is that if the government didn’t spend on pandemic supports and the Bank didn’t engage in quantitative easing, we would be in a deflationary depression cycle, and that would have left us all worse off.
With this in mind, here is economist Kevin Milligan with some added context:
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1470099272632733696
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1470100800261132288
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1470102174076006401
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1470103387714637827
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1470104572261638146
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1470105479288262657
Good reads:
- The Canadian government will now accept COVID tests from South Africa, dropping the requirement for travellers to get a test in a third country.
- Mary Ng warns that Canadians should prepare for the worst when it comes to the American EV tax credit.
- CRA (and other departments) had to shut down their websites over the weekend to patch a vulnerability.
- Library and Archives has updated their biography of Sir John A Macdonald to more accurately reflect his racist policies—but the page is difficult to locate.
- The G7 has sent a warning to Russia, saying there will be “consequences” if they invade Ukraine (for what that’s worth).
- The Conservative Party president has declared that Senator Batters’ petition to call for a referendum on a leadership review to be “invalid.” Because of course he did.
- Heather Scoffield predicts the things we’ll see in Tuesday’s fiscal update.
Odds and ends:
The National Post has an interview with Emmett Macfarlane about his new edited book, Dilemmas of Free Expression.
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