Lori Rennison resumed her role as Senior Policy Director and Head of Global Engagement in the Bank's International Economic Analysis Department in August 2026, following two years as Deputy Managing Director of the department. In this role, she oversees activities that support the Bank's participation and influence in international forums, including the G7, G20 and International Monetary Fund (IMF), while working closely with the Governor and G7/G20 Deputy Governor to advance the Bank's international priorities and leadership in areas that matter most to Canada. She led the Bank's priorities for Canada's 2018 and 2025 G7 Presidencies and chaired the G7 Digitalization Working Group from 2018 to 2024. Ms. Rennison also contributes to the strategic direction and management of the department, which analyzes current and emerging global economic developments and policy experiences, with a focus on their implications for Canada.
Ms. Rennison joined the Bank in 2007 from the Department of Finance, where she held leadership roles in economic and policy analysis. She was first based in the Bank’s Vancouver Office, where she took on the role of directing and managing the economic analysis activities of the Bank’s five regional offices. This work included overseeing and publishing the quarterly Business Outlook Survey and supporting the Bank’s communications strategy. After 2014, she took on senior policy advisor roles in the Canadian and International Economic Analysis Departments, leading their contributions to the Monetary Policy Report. She became a Senior Policy Director in 2017 overseeing the monitoring and projection teams in the Canadian Economic Analysis department.
Similar to those of other forecasters, the Bank of Canada’s forecasts of global GDP growth have shown persistent negative errors over the past five years. This is in contrast to the pre-crisis period, when errors were consistently positive as global GDP surprised to the upside. All major regions have contributed to the forecast errors observed since 2011, although the United States has been the most persistent source of notable errors.
At a time when the Bank is expecting a rotation of demand toward exports and investment, and transformative global trends are placing increasing emphasis on innovation, technology and organizational learning, an understanding of the competitiveness strategies of Canadian firms and the factors affecting them has become particularly relevant. This article summarizes findings from a Bank of Canada survey of 151 firms designed to extract signals on elements of firm strategy and organizational capital in order to help inform the macroeconomic outlook.
This article reviews recent work that uses principal-component analysis to extract information common to indicators from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey (BOS). The authors use correlation analysis and an out-of-sample forecasting exercise to assess and compare the information content of the principal component with that of responses to key individual survey questions on growth in real gross domestic product and in real business investment. Results suggest that summarizing the common movements among BOS indicators may provide useful information for forecasting near-term growth in business investment. For growth in real gross domestic product, however, the survey’s balance of opinion on future sales growth appears to be more informative.
