That is what the Provinces are asking, according to the Canadian Press. Both the Ontario and Alberta finance ministers have voiced their concerns about an Interest Rate increase and the assumed strengthening of the Canadian dollar from that action, and the effect of more Manufacturing jobs being lost due to a high Canadian Dollar.
“The Canadian economy cannot be described as truly healthy in all aspects while we are seeing losses of jobs in the manufacturing sector,†— Greg Sorbara Ontario Finance Minister
The problem being that inflation is starting to rear it’s ugly head and the only proven weapon against it is a tighter monetary policy (i.e. increased interest rates), but which has the side effect of strengthening the Canadian dollar and presumably raising it’s value against the American dollar. Truly an interesting “Catch-22” for the Bank of Canada’s Governor. We’ll see how this all sorts itself out in the coming months.
Telus is hopping into the BCE takeover story as well, which can’t help but drive up share prices some more. A combined Telus/Bell behemoth could see a return to the bad old days of “Your choice is Bell, and that’s it”, in the world of telecommunications, but then again, that might not be a bad thing either.
Geeks ahoy, June 29th at Rogers Wireless stores you can get your iPhone! I can see the lines forming already. No sign of any mention of them on their web site, or how much they are really going to cost (with access fees, etc.,), so stay tuned.
Here is a worrisome stats, less and less Canadians are in registered pension plans. The drop is not insignificant and it reflects the trend in industry to eliminate the Pension Plan as a benefit for employees. It would be interesting to see this data broken down by age group, how many folks between 20-40 are not in a pension plan?
