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The Canadian economy continues to grow at a solid pace, consistent with the Bank’s outlook in the January Monetary Policy Report Update.

This Report outlines recent developments in the Canadian economy that affect the rate of inflation and provides an account of the measures taken by the Bank of Canada to control inflation.

In the last half-year, the economic expansion in Canada has become well established, supported by low inflation, highly stimulative monetary conditions, and a strong U.S. economy.

The global economy has been unfolding largely as expected, and prospects for continued robust growth are quite favourable, especially over the near term.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an atypical recession in which some sectors of the economy boomed and others collapsed. This required a unique fiscal policy reaction to both support firms and stimulate activity in sectors with slack. Was fiscal policy able to get where it was needed? Mostly, yes.

At the Bank of Canada, we have worked hard over the past several years to define our goals and our methods for achieving them. We have continued to strengthen our monetary policy framework, and we have established priorities in all areas of our operations to help us meet our strategic objectives. In 2002, the Bank set out a medium-term plan for the period 2003–05. The plan’s clearly defined policy frameworks and priorities were critical in guiding our analysis and our decisions in 2003, a year in which Canadians across the country were affected by a number of severe and unanticipated events.

The Canadian economy continues to operate just above its full production capacity, and the near-term outlook for core inflation has moved slightly higher.

Canada’s inflation-control targets establish a specific medium-term objective for monetary policy.

The Canadian economy continues to adjust to major global developments.

Carbon dioxide emissions have been commonly modelled as rising and falling with total output. Yet many factors, such as energy-efficiency improvements and shifts to cleaner energy, can break this relationship. We evaluate these factors using US data and find that changes in energy efficiency of consumption goods explain a significant proportion of emissions fluctuations. This finding also implies that models that omit energy efficiency likely overestimate the trade-off between environmental protection and economic performance.