THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON BANKING, COMMERCE AND THE ECONOMY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Wednesday, November 27, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy met with videoconference this day at 4:16 p.m. [ET] to examine and report on Canada’s monetary policy framework.
Senator Pamela Wallin (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Hello to everyone joining us here and those online. Welcome to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy. My name is Pamela Wallin, and I serve as the chair of this committee. I would like to introduce the members of the committee with us today: Senator Fridhandler, Senator Gignac, Senator Varone and Senator Yussuff.
The committee is studying Canada’s monetary policy framework and the mandate of the Bank of Canada. For our only panel today, we have the pleasure of welcoming — in case anyone is confused by the note which we put together for both today’s witness and tomorrow’s witness, there is just the one witness today. Let me introduce Dr. Stephen Williamson, Professor and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in Central Banking 2017-27 at the University of Western Ontario.
Dr. Williamson, welcome. Thank you for being with us today. The floor is yours for your opening remarks.
Stephen Williamson, Professor and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in Central Banking 2017-27, University of Western Ontario, as an individual: Thanks to the committee for inviting me to talk to you today. I’ve worked for 40 years as an economist in Canada and the United States. I’ve had academic appointments at Queen’s University, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Iowa and Washington University in St. Louis. As well, I’ve had non-academic appointments at the Bank of Canada — that was my first job — the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Finally, I’ve been a seminar visitor or a long-term academic visitor at the Bank of Canada, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and most of the regional Federal Reserve Banks — I think all but one. I haven’t been to the San Francisco Fed, but for all the other 11, I have been there at one time or another.
I’ve been at the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Swedish central bank, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Korea. My bottom line is going to be that, in my opinion, the inflation-targeting agreement between the Bank of Canada and the federal government has served the country well, and I don’t think it needs substantive revision. We could talk about that, of course. I look forward to answering your questions.
The Chair: We should begin there because we’ve heard lots of testimony on dual mandates and different approaches to governance and transparency.
Senator Gignac: Welcome to our witness. We are fortunate to have Mr. Williamson with us given his huge expertise and background, so thank you for being here.
Could you elaborate more because you seem to be satisfied with the current mandate which focuses mostly on inflation, contrary to the U.S. which has a dual mandate? Some witnesses and some with huge reputations mentioned that maybe it would be more relevant to have a dual mandate. I’m just curious why you believe that we should be satisfied with the current mandate which focuses more on inflation. Thank you.
Mr. Williamson: Dual mandate is a bit of a thorny issue. In economics, there is a large body of theory and experience that tells us that in the long run, the stance of monetary policy doesn’t have any effect on anything real in the sense of real GDP, unemployment rate, employment, et cetera. We think there are short-run effects that are temporary, but those dissipate over time.
The reason why an inflation target is in part a good idea — and there are a number of reasons for it — is this is something that the central bank can actually control. The inflation rate is ultimately under the bank’s control in the short run and in the long run, and the control is imperfect, but they can control it.
The U.S. has had a long experience with this, so it’s written into legislation. There are a couple of acts of Congress going back to 1948, and there was an update in the 1970s. Dual mandate is fairly vague, actually. If you look at how the Federal Reserve System and the people on the Federal Open Market Committee interpret the dual mandate in the U.S., they take great pains to tell you that it would be a bad idea to specify a numerical target — a specific target — for the unemployment rate or the rate of growth in real GDP; essentially, it’s because those are things that the central bank cannot control in the long run. They can have some influence in the short run, but in the long run, they can’t specifically control those things.
When the bank says they have a flexible inflation target, what that means is that there are times when the inflation target does become secondary. When things are really bad — such as at the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020 or during the financial crisis — the inflation target does take second place in the scheme of things. For immediate decision making, what matters is the immediate problem, and they can worry about the inflation target later.
It’s a bit hard to —
The Chair: Do you have a follow-up, Senator Gignac?
Mr. Williamson: It is a bit hard to write down the specifics of how you react under those conditions and what exactly you should care about. I think it’s better that those things be left out of the explicit agreement and left to the discretion of the bank.
Senator Yussuff: Thank you, Professor Williamson, for being here with us today. We have had witnesses who have testified before the committee who have a very different perspective than the one you have articulated so far. A dual mandate does not contradict the bank’s core responsibility of inflation, but in a democratic society, inflation is not the only issue we should be focusing on. Society needs to function. Unemployment and growth are fundamental things, but unemployment is something that the bank should be concerned about. The bank has a blunt instrument to manage inflation, and the challenge is when they use it to its full extent, it causes a great deal of grief in society. Political people have to react to that.
In the U.S., we’ve seen from that experience that the bank has been able to manage its responsibility in a responsible way. Why wouldn’t that be something conducive to changing the bank’s mandate to ensure that it reflects a more modern reality of its responsibility?
Mr. Williamson: The argument would be that in controlling inflation, keeping inflation low and stable, the bank creates a sound economic environment that furthers these other goals and gives you a good performance in terms of real GDP growth and labour market conditions like the unemployment rate, et cetera. Some of the things you’re talking about are important things that are of concern for Canada. We care about the state of the labour market, productivity, growth in real GDP, the general welfare of Canadians, income distribution and all those things. A lot of those things are better left to elected officials to make decisions about.
Those are decisions that relate to fiscal policy and regulatory activity, et cetera. They shouldn’t be the primary concern of the Bank of Canada who are, in fact, unelected officials. It’s a good idea that they have a degree of independence from the federal government, but we want to limit what we ask them to do because they’re not elected.
Senator Yussuff: To follow up, the Federal Reserve has done this without any intentions or hesitations in regard to its mandate, which is basically the point we are trying to make. Given their history in managing a dual mandate, how would that alter the bank’s independence? It doesn’t alter its independence. It’s simply saying to take other considerations in regard to not just inflation; at the end of the day, there are other things we need to think about, and the bank will do its best, as it does its best to manage inflation also.
Mr. Williamson: The Fed has conducted monetary policy and spoken to its dual mandate in a way that really shies away from hard targets like a target for the unemployment rate, which would be a bad idea. In an agreement with, say, the Bank of Canada, it would be a terrible idea to enshrine specific economic growth targets or a target for the unemployment rate. That could, in fact, prove infeasible or get in the way of targeting inflation, which is kind of the primary role, as I see it, of the bank.
The Chair: Okay. We’ll come back to that. Thank you.
Senator Fridhandler: I just want to follow up on your views on the dual mandate, Professor Williamson.
In your publication “The Role of Central Banks,” you suggested that the bank’s flexible approach to inflation targeting appears to be a good compromise, and one would argue that the bank’s actual behaviour is in the spirit of the U.S. dual mandate. It sounds like you believe that would be an acceptable approach, even though we don’t articulate it explicitly.
Mr. Williamson: Yes. My guess is that the Fed would not behave any differently if they didn’t have the dual mandate, and it really doesn’t make much difference in how they actually behave, and for good reason.
As I wrote in that piece, yes, if you look at the actual behaviour of the bank, you would go into it as a kind of serious research project. But it looks like what the bank actually does and what they have tended to do over time is mostly responding to the unemployment rate. It’s kind of interesting. That’s what they actually do, but in doing that, they manage to target inflation. In part, it’s because these things are related. It is probably because the state of the labour market can be related to the behaviour of inflation.
It’s just a matter of what you write down as their goal and how you’re going to evaluate their performance, I think.
Senator Fridhandler: I will come back to follow up on that, but I have another question.
I am sorry, Senator Ringuette, because I might be stealing your thunder.
Professor Williamson, you have broad experience with the various Federal Reserve Banks in the U.S. In Canada, we have one central bank. I’m interested to hear your views on how the various banks in the U.S. and the consolidation of the actions of the Federal Reserve reflect regional issues. In Canada, when our central bank senior officials appear before us, they don’t look at things from a regional perspective. Are we better off or worse off for that in Canada?
Mr. Williamson: Oh, I don’t know. One of the mandates of the regional Feds is to collect local information. There’s a thing called the Beige Book, and the Beige Book summarizes all that stuff. That information comes from various sources. Some of it is anecdotal evidence that, in principle, could give you early information on what’s going on in the economy before it shows up in official statistics.
Some of the information gets collected through regional Feds which have branches. Every branch has a board of directors. Those directors are not just bankers; they’re community leaders and people working in various industries. They have a lot of first-hand information that they pool. The regional Feds collect that, and it goes into this document which ends up in Washington and gets shared through the system.
I don’t know if there is anything comparable in Canada. In general, the bank does a fairly good job of collecting information and paying attention to what’s going on in the regions of Canada.
The Fed is very unusual. There’s a whole history behind why it’s decentralized. It’s unique in the world, as far as I know, having these 12 semi-independent regional Federal Reserve Banks. Part of its strength is the diversity of opinion. For me, that’s an important thing. The regional Fed presidents can go out and speak publicly. They sometimes disagree with each other in public. You rarely get that in Canada.
In Canada, as you know, everything is centralized. The people on the Governing Council of the Bank of Canada go out and speak in public, but they rarely disagree with each other. We have a diversity of opinion across the different Federal Reserve Banks. They have different ideas about economics and how the economy works and how monetary policy works. That is a healthy thing. Maybe you get less of that in Canada. For me, that would be a loss, but if it is a loss, it is a loss we share with most other countries in the world. The Bank of England also has centralized central banking.
The Chair: Before we move on here, I want to come back to this, Dr. Williamson, to be sure of what you’re saying on the dual mandate. You’re saying that even though the Fed has it explicitly, it would be doing what it is doing regardless. Although the Bank of Canada doesn’t have it, they are doing it regardless of whether they have it or not anyway because everybody would obviously take that into account and be concerned about it. Have I summarized that correctly?
Mr. Williamson: That’s about it, yes.
Senator Ringuette: In Canada, the bank has a review of its mandate every five years. Do you agree that this five-year period is correct? We’ve heard that the Feds have a kind of yearly review in front of Congress and the Senate. What is your opinion on that?
Mr. Williamson: Well, the Fed doesn’t really have anything formal like we do in Canada with the way this review happens. I think five years seems about right. I know that they’ve now started to go out and seek opinions for the next renewal. Anything shorter than five years is probably too short, and anything longer would be too long. Five years seems about right for a renewal of this thing.
It is clearly important that you revisit it periodically so that you can take into account whatever happened in the last five years that might cause you to revise your opinions about how monetary policy works and what we should be telling the bank to do or what the bank should agree with the federal government that it should be doing.
Senator Ringuette: There is also an issue of looking into the possibility of having external expertise as a committee that would provide some kind of secretarial economic expertise and be more transparent and consultative with other experts. What would be your opinion on that?
Mr. Williamson: The question is this: What kind of power would such a committee have? Is it purely advisory? Does what it says have any force with the bank or with the federal government? It’s establishing another institution. What is its role exactly?
I could see a move for more transparency on the part of the bank. We don’t know so much about what happens in the room when the governing council is talking. They have recently published some minutes of their meeting, but that’s just a summary of what people said. For instance, the Fed publishes full transcripts after five years. You know exactly what people said.
Senator Ringuette: On the kind of information that we’re getting in regard to this potential, it would be a permanent advisory committee with a rotating mandate of its members. Of course, it would provide transparency in regard to the data used and the analysis of that data.
Mr. Williamson: Here is an alternative: You might think about how the governing council is chosen. Recently, the bank has done something to bring in more academic advice. They have another deputy governor that is a part-time position. They are doing a second one of these appointments, which is a person who is like a halftime deputy governor and would otherwise have an academic job.
There is a question of how that person is chosen. It could be that you set up a different structure for the choice of other people to actually serve on the Governing Council of the Bank of Canada. That would be a vehicle for getting more input into monetary policy decisions. I’m a little skeptical of the idea that you create another advisory group to the bank. If it doesn’t have any force to it, it’s just an opportunity for people to talk and write things. Maybe the bank really doesn’t have to listen to what they say.
The Chair: Could you go into your notion of what transparency would mean? I agree that just appointing another advisory council doesn’t accomplish that unless the mandate is explicit. When you talk about transparency, what do you mean? What would you like to see?
Mr. Williamson: More information on what goes on in the deliberations that the governing council goes through. For example, in the U.S., eventually you know word for word what people said. There is a vote. This is in legislation here, where the governor gets to decide; that’s kind of unusual.
I think in practice, the governing council has a fair amount of influence on the governor, but it’s up to the governor to take the advice of the governing council. The governor doesn’t have to.
The Chair: Would you propose that it go to a system of voting?
Mr. Williamson: Yes, a system of voting might be a good thing.
Senator Varone: Thank you, professor, for being here. With everything that we have learned, to me the Bank of Canada is already rather transparent in the way it outlines its inflation targets, and it states it quite openly at being 1% to 3%. Not being an economist, I know that one of the consequences is employment. The higher the interest rates are, the more unemployment is created. Does it really matter what the inflation rate is if you’re out of a job, because you can’t afford anything anyway?
Including the dual mandate, or having at least employment as part of that mandate, seems to me to temper what could possibly happen. I’m curious about your remark about not setting an employment target the way they set an inflation target. I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on that.
Mr. Williamson: We found out in this last high inflation episode what happens when inflation gets out of bounds. That’s bad news too. It’s bad news in the sense that people start paying a lot of attention to it, and then everybody has an idea about what is causing it. It’s a tough thing to go through politically for the government and for the bank when they exceed their inflation target.
I understand exactly what you’re saying that for an individual, unemployment is a serious thing. Prices are a little higher — but what if you’re unemployed? That’s really bad news.
We have recognized for a long time that the ability of monetary policy to control the state of the labour market over a long period of time is nil. You can only have short-term effects. One notion was back in the 1970s when a high inflation episode was caused in part by bad monetary policy. The idea in vogue at the time — in the 1960s — was that you could trade off unemployment and inflation. This was just a policy choice where we could have lower unemployment at the cost of maybe higher inflation permanently.
In theory and over time with experience, we have come to understand that in fact there isn’t a trade-off. You cannot get lower unemployment permanently by just bearing higher inflation. All that happens is that you try to keep the unemployment rate really low through monetary policy, and all that happens is that you end up with the same unemployment that you would have had anyway and also higher inflation. It’s not in the power of the central bank to really change the state of the real economy, the rate of growth in real GDP and the state of the labour market over the long haul.
Senator Gignac: Let’s explore more with you about this governance, transparency and accountability by the Bank of Canada. I appreciate the fact that you mentioned to maybe have a vote so that we know how things are good.
But let’s talk about the nomination of the deputy governor in Canada.
In the U.S., the seven members of the board of governors are nominated by the president, but guess what: They have to be confirmed by the Senate. From time to time, after hearing, the Senate could reject, and this is interesting. At least we know where the people stand exactly.
In the U.K., correct me if I’m wrong, but I have read that the deputy governor — an external member — is chosen not by the governor, but by parliamentarians.
Do you see some advantage or something that could be possible in Canada? Right now, it’s the Governor of the Bank of Canada who decides who to hire, and that could influence the independence of the deputy governor. Do you agree with my statement?
Mr. Williamson: Yes, I think regarding some of these elements that are in the Bank of England — I don’t know all the details of what happens at the Bank of England — it’s a useful structure that they have.
The way the Fed works is for the voting members on the Federal Open Market Committee, there are the presidential appointments. As you say, they have to be confirmed in the Senate. Some of them have been thrown out. There have been people nominated, but the Senate did not approve them. That’s happened in recent history.
Then the regional Fed presidents are, in principle, appointed by the board of directors of the regional bank. Every regional Fed has a board of directors. They are basically community people. There are some rules about not having too many bankers on the board of directors of the regional Fed and rules about the composition of the board, but they essentially choose the president of the bank. Then the president goes to Washington and votes. They don’t all get to vote at the same time. There are rules about voting. There are 12 Federal Reserve Banks, and only 6 of them get to vote at a given time.
Senator Gignac: We know that the Canadian structure is different than the Fed. But you will agree with me that we have to find a way in Canada so that, at least, at some point, for example, the Senate and parliamentarians should have the opportunity to have a discussion or a conversation before the deputy governor and even the external member are officially appointed. Because right now, quite frankly, we are not involved. It’s the Governor of the Bank of Canada who decides whom the colleagues are around the table. Accountability and transparency could be improved if we find a process closer to that of the U.S. or the U.K. Do you agree with me?
Mr. Williamson: Yes, I think that’s right; I think it would be useful to have some role of Parliament in the choice of deputy governors. As you say, as it is, maybe the governor has a little too much power, and as a result, the people who get chosen will be people who will agree with the way the governor thinks.
Senator Gignac: Thank you.
The Chair: We did hear some testimony last week on the bank’s behaviour during COVID and the funding of the federal government expenditures. Did you watch that closely? Do you have a view? People were suggesting they should have had a much shorter leash on the government in terms of repayment.
Mr. Williamson: I didn’t see that. Tell me again. A shorter leash in terms of —
The Chair: The concern was that — I’ll put it in quotation marks — “the printing of money” just carried on, and because people didn’t see an end date, they didn’t say, “Okay, this is a one-year thing or a six-month thing.” It just carried on. That’s what then led to the spiralling at the end. I’d just like your views as you sit back and watch the behaviour of the bank and, I guess, if you have a view on the government as well during that critical time.
Mr. Williamson: I think you’re talking about the expansion in the bank’s balance sheet.
The Chair: Exactly.
Mr. Williamson: Quantitative easing, in other words, is something we didn’t do following the financial crisis, as a lot of countries in the world did. There was a lot of quantitative easing in Japan, Switzerland and the United States, but the Bank of Canada did it for the first time during COVID.
I don’t think it contributed to inflation. Essentially, it is kind of like debt management. If you were to quarrel with it, you might say it’s like the Bank of Canada stepping into the federal government’s role as a debt manager. There is debt management policy that comes out of the Department of Finance, which is basically managing the structure of outstanding government debt by deciding when you have to finance a deficit, whether you are going to issue long-maturity debt, short-maturity debt, debt or whatever.
What the bank did, essentially, was buy long-maturity government debt with overnight settlement balances held by banks. That’s interest-bearing stuff. It’s more like short-term government debt than money. It’s not something that is used out there in retail payments that you use as a means of payment in consumer spending. It just sits and earns interest overnight. It’s more like short-term government debt.
If you were to quarrel with them, you might say, “Well, the Bank of Canada decided it is going to do debt management. How come they are doing that? Shouldn’t that be something that the Department of Finance is concerned with?”
The Chair: What do you think of that?
Mr. Williamson: It’s not such a great idea. Maybe the bank doesn’t actually have the instruments to do it, because the only instrument that they have are settlement balances, which get locked up in the banking system. Maybe it’s not a big effect, but it could actually have a negative effect. Here is the bank swapping settlement balances for government debt, which is useful stuff in financial markets. It gets traded around and used as collateral in overnight credit markets — very useful stuff is government debt. We could be doing a bad thing, but I don’t think it contributed to inflation.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Varone: It seems that we have an economic crisis around the corner every single week in Canada. I’m concerned about just a single mandate being in the tool box of the Governor of the Bank of Canada. We have heard testimony about expanding that to a dual mandate. One witness said that we need to give them tools on the money supply.
Again, there was yesterday’s announcement from future President Trump about a 25% tariff. Does the Bank of Canada, in your opinion, have enough tools in its tool box to be effective against these crises that seem to be coming every week?
Mr. Williamson: It’s a good question. What is implicit in what you’re saying is there are many things that the bank would have to worry about in the future. Many of those things, we can’t anticipate. It’s very hard to write them down in some kind of mandate for the bank. We could say financial stability is a goal. What else? I don’t know. There could be many things.
As you say, there are always unique things that happen. It’s very hard for you to specify in advance exactly how the bank should be thinking about these things. To some extent, you have to give them the latitude to make decisions on the spot about those things, but you’re right; we’re faced with some very serious problems coming up. The new administration in the United States is very unpredictable, and God knows what we’re dealing with here.
At one time, the bank thought it was a good idea — maybe before inflation targeting — to pay a lot of attention to the U.S.-Canada exchange rate. I think successfully what they have done is taken the focus away from that. Now the idea is in targeting inflation, so if they’re successful at targeting inflation, the exchange rate kind of looks after itself. That’s proven to be the case.
I think I said this before that inflation is something that in fact the bank can control. We have seen an episode where that got out of control for reasons that were, I think, beyond the scope of monetary policy. Essentially, COVID caused inflation basically; that’s roughly speaking.
To some extent, if the bank is successful in targeting inflation at 2%, that just looks after a lot of other problems indirectly.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Gignac: I will shift topics. We have three aspects that we analyze here at the Senate Banking Committee. The first is the mandate, the second is the 2% target and the third is the Bank of Canada’s preferred measures of the underlying core inflation. Since you are the specialist, you will remember that for 15 years, they’ve had what they call the CPIX, which is the consumer price index, or CPI, excluding eight volatile components. Then, all of a sudden in 2016 or 2017, they dropped that and went with the three preferred measures: CPI-common, CPI-median and CPI-trim. After a while, they dropped the CPI-common. Anyway, it’s complicated. I’m an economist, but I even have difficulty explaining what the CPI-trim is.
Is there any word about that? The Swedish central bank uses CPI excluding interest rate because the central bank affects the interest rate, so they’ll remove the mortgage rate, if you want, to measure the underlying inflation. Do you believe it’s still relevant to maintain the Bank of Canada’s current preferred measures of core inflation, or would it be well advised to consider other approaches, like the Swedish central bank’s approach to exclude the debt services since the central bank affects debt services? Do you know what I mean?
Mr. Williamson: It’s not surprising that you find this confusing. You should find it confusing. That’s not good. I think all these alternative measures of inflation are not helpful. It doesn’t help in the bank’s communication with the public, with you or with anybody.
The logic behind it was there are some things that affect inflation that are temporary, so by stripping some prices out of the CPI, you might strip out things that are genuinely temporary. The first notion of this was to take out food and energy because that was from the 1970s, and those were highly volatile. Why don’t we take those things away?
Of course, the problem is that maybe sometimes oil prices go up or energy prices go up and that’s permanent, so it’s some purely statistical procedure that you’re using to exclude some things. It’s not always going to work very well.
There’s another argument that says, “Maybe I want to look at core measures because there is a statistical argument.” If you’re the Bank of Canada and you’re trying to target inflation, you don’t care what the last measure of inflation is because you can’t do anything about it. That’s done. What you care about is your forecast of inflation, so you want to do as good a job as you can of forecasting what inflation is going to be in the future. Then you want to be able to understand what effect your actions are going to have on the inflation rate in the future.
There was an argument that said, “Maybe these core measures are better forecasts than actual headline CPI inflation of future inflation.” That’s not always true either. If you wanted to forecast future inflation, you look at everything. You wouldn’t just strip some prices out of the CPI to try to do that. I am a little skeptical of the use of so-called core measures.
As you say, it could be there is something wrong with the CPI as measured. That may be a problem for Statistics Canada. We include effective mortgage rates and the cost of housing, and maybe in terms of economic theory, it’s just the wrong way to be constructing the index —
The Chair: We’ll go to Senator Gignac’s follow-up here.
Senator Gignac: Thank you. In plain English, you’re recommending that we, as a committee, do not spend too much time on this measure of core inflation because at the end of the day, Canadians pay the overall inflation. This is the most important thing. We could question Statistics Canada more. We have questioned them on the housing side.
I appreciate your answer because I found that so confusing. When we want to compare core inflation in Canada with core inflation in the U.S., they have different measures on both sides. If I understand correctly, we don’t need to spend too much time regarding any recommendation on that third topic of our mandate.
Mr. Williamson: Yes, I agree.
The Chair: Just to wrap up the questions here, you began your remarks today by saying that all things being equal, everything seems to be working more or less. But if you could do one or two things that would make the bank and its relationship with the public more effective, what would those one or two things be, if we could just have a quick, short summary?
Mr. Williamson: Some of the things that came up today helped me think about it. There is room for more transparency and more input into how the members of the governing council get chosen. I think the bank does a pretty good job of going out and explaining itself, but part of the way the governing council is chosen, it makes public statements from different members of the governing council all sound the same. They are kind of all on the same page. We maybe don’t have so much diversity of opinion coming out of the bank.
The Chair: Okay. That’s very helpful. Any quick final points here? We’re good. That’s been most helpful —
Senator Fridhandler: We didn’t address whether you think there are specific things that need to be amended or supplemented in the Bank Act or in the agreement that the bank enters into with the Government of Canada. Are there things that bother you that aren’t there or should be there?
Mr. Williamson: The agreement, I think, is fine as is. Some of the stuff that we talked about to do with the governance, I think, relates to the Bank Act, right? There’s how bank officials get chosen and members of the governing council — that’s Bank Act material.
The Chair: That is very helpful. Thank you for being with us today as we continue our study of the mandate of the bank. We appreciate your time and insight. We’ve been looking at this for a long time.
Thank you, Dr. Stephen Williamson, Professor and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in Central Banking at the University of Western Ontario. We will seek you out again as we continue this study in the new year.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of our meeting. For reference, we have one witness tomorrow, and then we will take a look at our interim report. Thanks very much.
(The committee adjourned.)