Council Reports
April 1, 2020 - The C.D. Howe Institute’s Monetary and Financial Measures Working Group, supported by a group of financial market experts, and co-chaired by former Governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge and former Deputy Superintendent of OSFI Mark Zelmer, held its second meeting on Monday, March 30, 2020.
The working group agreed that, while there is a need for governments and central banks to monitor the effect of current crisis measures on debt and potential future inflation, these concerns are not a short-run issue and should not come at the expense of the immediate need for large-scale fiscal stimulus. To that end, the Monetary and Financial Measures Working Group recommends the following:
Quickly…Enhanced Government Credit Facility Needed: Crisis Working Group on Monetary and Financial Measures
March 25, 2020 - The Institute has established an expert crisis working group for finance and monetary policy, co-chaired by David Dodge, former Governor of the Bank of Canada, and Mark Zelmer, former Deputy Superintendent of OSFI. The group’s first meeting was held on Monday, March 23, 2020.
The crisis working group is calling for an expansive government guaranteed credit facility, in tandem with various fiscal measures, to help Canadians and the business community survive the COVID-19 economic crisis. Possible features of the facility could include:
100% guarantee by the Government of Canada, and available to Canadian firms either through federal and provincially-regulated…May 16, 2019 – At their recent meeting, members of the C.D. Howe Institute Competition Policy Council concluded Canada’s competition policy toolkit is sufficient to address new forms of market power that may arise in the digital economy.
Governments worldwide are wrestling with public concerns about the perceived power and influence of “Big Tech” companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Such players provide digital platforms for searching, shopping and social media and collect extensive datasets about users’ online activities. In the face of populist appeals for a revamp of antitrust rules and pressure to directly regulate digital platforms, the consensus of the Council was that Canada’s competition law…
