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The authors review the eight largest public pension funds in Canada. These funds are an important source of retirement income for Canadians. They are also significant investors, with net assets under management of over $1 trillion. The authors outline the investment strategies of the funds and how they interact with financial institutions and participate in financial markets. They also discuss the ways in which the funds’ risk-management frameworks could contribute to financial system stability and how they minimize potential vulnerabilities.

Available sources of hourly wage data in Canada sometimes send conflicting signals about wage growth. This note thus has two objectives: first, we develop a wage measure—the wage-common—to better capture the (underlying) wage pressures reflecting the common trend across the available data sources. Second, we re-examine the relationship between wage growth and macro drivers (labour market slack and labour productivity).

Read a message from Governor Macklem, learn about our planning framework and find out how we will track our progress.

A rise in newcomer arrivals has boosted Canada’s population growth in recent years, adding to both supply and demand. Assessing how this change impacts the economy can provide insight into inflationary pressures.

A trade surplus and a trade deficit are both measures of a country’s balance of trade. They are a calculation of whether a country exports or imports more.

Governor Stephen S. Poloz talks about key issues for the Bank at the beginning of 2020.

External Deputy Governor Michelle Alexopoulos discusses the evolution of artificial intelligence and its potential effects on jobs, productivity and economic growth—now, and in the future.

To plan our future priorities, we have to take into account the environment in which we’re operating. Since we conducted our last environmental scan, the world has experienced a number of significant changes, and at great speed. More than ever, we need to prepare for a range of potential futures.

The sharp depreciation of the Canadian dollar and the successful launch of the euro have sparked a lively debate in Canada about the possible benefits of formally adopting the U.S. dollar as our national currency. Some observers have suggested that this debate is largely irrelevant, since Canada is already highly "dollarized." Canadian businesses and households, they assert, often use the U.S. dollar to perform standard money functions in preference to their own currency. Very little evidence has been provided, however, to support these claims. The authors review the available data with a view to drawing some tentative conclusions about the extent to which Canada has already been informally dollarized. The evidence suggests that many of the concerns that have been expressed about the imminent demise of the Canadian dollar have been misplaced. The Canadian dollar continues to be used as the principal unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value within our borders. Moreover, there is no indication that dollarization is likely to take hold in the foreseeable future. Indeed, in many respects, the Canadian economy is less dollarized now than it was 20 years ago.

This monthly newsletter features the latest research publications by Bank of Canada economists including external publications and working papers published on the Bank of Canada’s website.