Governor Macklem holds a press conference after his speech / Conférence de presse après le discours

Well, first of all, I would not explain it the way you explained the last renewal. What I would say, and this is what I said at the press conference, I think the last renewal really reflected continuity and clarity. I don't think there was a significant change. I think the renewal reflected in clearer terms what we've been doing for many years. And I think you've seen the whole time I've been governor, I've been doing my very best to be as clear as we can be. And I think the renewal is very clear. It states very clearly that our primary objective is price stability. It also says that we will work to support maximum sustainable employment, but it's not directly observable. And at the end of the day, we have an inflation target and it's critical that we keep inflation expectations well anchored because one thing we know for sure is that if we don't do that, nothing in the economy is going to work well. And that has certainly been our focus. I don't need to remind everybody inflation was a little over 8% in 2022. We raised rates very forcefully and an important reason we did that was to keep inflation expectations well anchored. That worked and that allowed us to get inflation back down without causing a recession, without causing a big increase in unemployment. So to go back to the last agreement, I really think we were trying to provide a clearer statement of what we've been doing. The thing that did change was consistent with that clarity, we committed to providing more information on the labor market and you've seen that on our website. We have a whole dashboard. We look at a broad range of labor market indicators to give a sense of the overall health of the labor market. You can't summarize the labor market in a single number like unemployment. You've got to look at employment rates, participation rates, different segments of the labor market. And that was the goal. You've also seen that once a year I give a speech looking at the health of the labor market. It is an important input into our monetary policy decisions and that's really what the renewal reflected and I don't think that's going to change.

Hi.

Well, thank you for the question and don't worry, Promit, I'm very focused on inflation. My attention is certainly job one. So what did we see in yesterday's inflation numbers? Inflation didn't change. It came out at 2.2, same as the previous month. As you indicated, food price inflation was up and in fact we've seen it move up the last few months. That appears to reflect a few things. We've seen bad weather has resulted in poor harvests in a number of countries, that's affecting food prices around the world. In the case of some goods, US tariffs are having an impact. For example, coffee: a lot of coffee beans get imported to the United States, roasted and made into coffee that's then exported. So even though we don't have tariffs on coffee from other countries, the fact that the US does has an impact on us. And we've also seen some increases in shipping costs. Going forward, we are seeing some attenuation, some easing of those pressures. So our expectation is, I'm not predicting next month, but over the next number of months we are expecting to see some easing of food price inflation. But I'd say two things. One is that's not going to be in every component. Beef prices, for example, are very high because ranchers reduced the size of their herds, that's not going to change quickly. And look, if you're a family that's already having difficulty putting food on the table, the fact that food price inflation might come down is not the same thing as food prices coming down, and that is probably cold comfort. So I think food price inflation is going to be on the minds of many Canadians. I will say, monetary policy, our job, we don't target specific prices. We don't try to control certain specific prices. They are determined in the market. Our job is to keep overall inflation close to the target. And overall inflation has been close to the target for more than a year now and we are very focused on keeping it there.

Sir, could you just repeat the last part of your question again? I was having trouble hearing it on the line.