The Bank of Canada’s decision last week to lower its policy rate by 50 basis points increases the gap between the U.S. Federal Reserve’s policy rate and the Bank of Canada’s rate to approximately 130 basis points. While this gap might close somewhat if the Federal Reserve lowers its rate at its meeting this week, a substantial U.S. premium will still exist.
Since borrowing rates are tied to policy rates, interest rates in Canada will remain well below those in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. This gap will continue to put downward pressure on the value of the Canadian dollar against the U.S. greenback, as investors favour higher-earning U.S. dollar-denominated assets over Canadian dollar assets. President-elect Trump’s threatened trade actions against Canada could also exert further downward pressure on the loonie, especially if the Bank of Canada responds to Trump’s actions by making additional rate cuts. For context, it took $1.33 Canadian dollars to purchase one U.S. dollar on January 1, 2024, compared to $1.43 Canadian dollars on December 13, 2024. This represents a substantial depreciation in the Canadian dollar’s value of approximately 7.6 per cent over the period.
What effects will a declining Canadian dollar have on the Canadian economy?
In short, it will increase demand for domestic output and labour and put upward pressure on inflation via higher import prices, and it could also lower productivity growth and further hurt living standards.
Why the impact on productivity?
Because Canada imports most of its machinery and equipment (including information and communications technology) from the U.S. and other countries, and investment in this type of physical capital helps drive productivity growth. A declining Canadian dollar makes capital equipment imports more expensive, thereby discouraging investment and slowing productivity growth. A declining Canadian dollar may also shelter domestic firms from foreign competition, which could dampen their incentive to invest in productivity-enhancing assets, even if they price their output in U.S. dollars.
Hence, if the Canadian dollar remains weak against the U.S. dollar and other currencies, it may be more difficult to reverse Canada’s productivity woes. Again, productivity—the amount of GDP per hour of labour the economy produces—is key to improving living standards, which have been on the decline in Canada. From July to September of 2024, the economy grew by 0.3 per cent yet per-person GDP (an indicator of living standards) fell by 0.4 per cent (after adjusting for inflation).
Canada also indirectly imports technology via direct investments made by U.S.-based companies in their Canadian subsidiaries. While a declining Canadian dollar makes it cheaper for U.S. companies to buy assets in Canada, it also reduces the U.S. dollar value of profits earned over time in Canada by American-owned companies. This phenomenon, combined with an unstable Canadian dollar, might discourage inward foreign direct investment and associated technology transfers by increasing the financial uncertainty of such investment.
To be clear, this is not a criticism of the Bank of Canada’s move last week to help lower domestic interest rates given the Bank’s primary mandate to meet its inflation rate target of 2 per cent. Rather, governments—including the Trudeau government—must enact policies to encourage business investment in productivity-enhancing assets.
For starters, policymakers should reduce business tax rates and the tax rate on capital gains, to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. They should also dramatically reduce the regulatory burden and other barriers to entry and growth, especially those faced by small and medium-sized businesses. And the federal and provincial governments should increase competition in the domestic economy by reducing interprovincial trade barriers.
For example, the provinces could adopt a policy of “mutual recognition” so the standards and licencing requirements in one province would be accepted by all provinces. Provinces can also unilaterally eliminate self-imposed trade barriers (as Alberta did in 2019 with grazing permits for livestock). Of course, due to resistance from special interest groups that benefit from internal barriers, such reforms will not be easy. But the economic risks to the Canadian economy—from even the threat of a trade war with the U.S.—could generate support among Canadians for these reforms. Indeed, reducing interprovincial barriers to trade and labour mobility might be the single most important thing that governments in Canada could do to improve productivity.
With Canada’s lower inflation rate, weaker labour market and weaker economic growth outlook compared to the U.S., lower interest rates in Canada seem appropriate. Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem wants to see economic activity pick up to absorb slack in the economy and prevent inflation settling below the bank’s 2 per cent target. Clearly, the Bank should focus on inflation and domestic economic conditions. But policymakers must do their part to create a better environment for investment and innovation, the keys to productivity and increased living standards for Canadians.
Steven Globerman
Senior Fellow and Addington Chair in Measurement, Fraser Institute
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
