The Bank of Canada left rates unchanged as there was not enough reason to make another reduction given everything that is going on economically across the country and down south. The bank noted that the unpredictability of what’s happening with tariffs, lowered the risk to growth and a possible increase to inflation, determining that they were going to pause any further rate cuts until they see more data and the outcome so far.

Bottom Line according to Dr. Sherry Cooper, DLC’s own economist;

The US is determined to impose worldwide tariffs, disproportionately hitting Canada, Mexico, and China, the US’s top trading partners. This is a misguided neo-Mercantilist policy. Mercantilism assumes that the global economic pie is fixed, so if one country prospers, another must fail. This idea of a zero-sum game was debunked in the 18th century by Adam Smith and others who showed that if countries have a competitive advantage in various products and services, all are better off by producing and trading those products with the rest of the world. It is not a zero-sum game. The economic pie grows with trade. This was the idea behind globalization and the USMCA free trade agreement.

Given Canada’s vulnerability to tariffs, the economy will suffer more than the US, which has a relatively closed economy (where exports are a small proportion of GDP). Prices will rise depending on the duration and size of the coming tariffs, but mitigating the inflation will be the weakness in economic activity. Stagflation, a buzzword from the 1970s, is back in the lexicon.

We expect the BoC to resume cutting the policy rate in 25-bps increments until it reaches 2.0%-to-2.25% this summer, triggering a rebound in home sales. Layoffs and spending cuts will dampen sentiment, but lower interest rates will bring buyers off the sidelines. Housing inventories have risen sharply with new condo supply and a marked rise in the new listings of existing homes, and home prices are falling.

Because the pathway with tariffs is still unclear, the BoC decided in April on a wait and see approach. Our next Bank of Canada announcement is June 4 so we will have further insight and data to determine what will happen at that point.