A photo of the outside facade of the Bank of Canada.
The outside facade of the Bank of Canada. Credit: Bank of Canada / Flickr Credit: Bank of Canada / Flickr

Inflation fell to a rate of 1.6 per cent in September. As a result, the Bank of Canada has been lowering its interest rates. Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland celebrated cooling inflation and decreasing interest rates on Wednesday, noting that wages in Canada have outpaced inflation for 20 months.

However, for many working Canadians, recent news of a recovering economy has had little bearing on their daily lives. 

Aaron Westaway, a retail worker living in Ottawa, said changes in inflation rates don’t mean much to him, despite the hopeful headlines he encounters. Westaway had to make major lifestyle changes to accommodate the record high prices in 2022, and the cooling economy has yet to bring his life back to normal.

Every month, after spending half his income on rent, Westaway must make a few hundred dollars last. Grocery prices hit him hard, so he has found other ways to save money. To save on transit costs, he walks for more than an hour between his house and his job.

“There’s definitely a fitness component to it, but the larger component is that it saves on money,” Westaway said.

The rich got richer

An early October report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) showed the purchasing power of Canada’s wealthiest households increased in 2023. Higher interest rates mean higher payments on loans, but it also means higher investment income.

A report from Statistics Canada, released in the same week, showed the gap in disposable income between Canada’s richest and poorest has become the highest it has ever been since the agency began collecting this data in 1999. Income from financial assets has led the wealth gap to widen as well.

D.T. Cochrane, senior economist at the Canadian Labour Congress, has previously told rabble.ca that interest rate hikes have led to weakening of the labour market from a worker’s perspective. He said he has been tracking several indicators which signal, to him, that recent interest rate hikes could ultimately do more harm than good. In September, there was a year over year increase in the number of people working part-time despite looking for full-time work. In addition, the youth unemployment rate sat at 13 per cent in September, a rate higher than it was at the same time last year.

“We all benefit when the total amount of labor power that’s on offer is being put to use,” he said. “There is a ton of work that needs to be done[…] We should be making sure that every single person who is ready, willing and able to offer their labor power is allowed to do so. We should be making use of all labor power to accomplish the socially necessary things we know need to be achieved.”

The Bank of Canada has taken too much credit for cooling inflation and not enough responsibility for unemployment, according to Mario Seccareccia, professor emeritus from the University of Ottawa’s economics department. He co-wrote a primer in 2020 that explored whether interest rates effectively target inflation. He and his co-author found that changes in interest rates directly impact income inequality and only indirectly affect inflation.

“It cannot have a direct impact on the inflation rate, because it’s people that are setting prices. There are all kinds of decisions taken by business firms in how they set these prices,” Seccareccia said. “To give you a simple example, the fact that the Bank of Canada raises interest doesn’t mean that the price of oil internationally is going to change as a result. There’s no connection whatsoever.”

Higher interest rates didn’t cool inflation

Jim Stanford, economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, wrote in 2023 that rising interest rates did affect inflation, just not in the way the Bank of Canada intended. He noted that between March and April 2023, there was a small uptick in inflation. The official Statistics Canada announcement said this uptick was mainly caused by rent prices and mortgage interest costs. Stanford said both of these factors are direct consequences of higher interest rates.

Seccareccia said interest rate hikes discourage spending, which is what the Bank of Canada intends. The nasty side-effect, however, is growth will slow significantly and unemployment will rise. This can eventually lead to a recession. Seccareccia said he knows for a fact this can happen because he witnessed it when the American central bank raised interest rates in the early 1980s. In 1981 and 1982, there was a subsequent recession.

“It’s like starving the patient to cure the disease,” he said.

The way to directly target inflation and increase consumer spending, he said, is to make full employment a priority. Full employment is difficult to pull off in the current situation because the Bank of Canada’s mandate is laser-focused on inflation targets.

Before the pandemic, Seccareccia signed onto a petition calling for the bank’s mandate to be amended to include other economic goals such as full employment.

“I’m old enough. I could tell you right now, I remember when Louis Rasminsky Fonds was the Bank of Canada governor from 1962 to 1973,” Seccateccoa said. “He was not afraid to pronounce the words full employment.”

The Bank of Canada has indeed shown their primary concern is inflation. When the inflation rate hit a record high of eight per cent in the summer of 2022, the Bank of Canada raised its interest rates ten times between then and today.

 “I’d emphasize that inflation control is the Bank’s primary mandate,” said Alex Paterson, a spokesperson for the Bank of Canada, “The Bank has long said that a healthy labour market and low, stable and predictable inflation go hand in hand.”  

He pointed to comments made by the bank’s governor, Tiff Macklem, in June. Macklem said labour market adjustments are never evenly distributed and monetary policy cannot target specific parts of it. He acknowledged the growing slack in the labour market during a Q&A in September. Now that inflation is closer to target, Macklem said the bank is hoping to see growth speed up.

Carolyn Rogers,  the senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, said in a speech on Wednesday that the last five years have been eventful. There has been a pandemic, the sharpest economic downturn in a century, followed by the fastest recovery on record, and a big spike in inflation, she said. 

“Lately, it’s been good to see inflation back to our 2 per cent target,” Rogers said. “Monetary policy worked, not painlessly, but it did get inflation under control without creating the sharp economic downturn that many feared.” 

Westaway, who sees himself as an average working Canadian, said he is not too interested in the debate around what should be included in the Bank of Canada’s mandate. What he wants is for his purchasing power to increase if inflation is down.  

“My main concern is I’m not able to save money,” Westaway said. “I’ve had multiple times in the last year where I’ve basically just had rice up until I get my next paycheck.”

As the winter months approach, Westaway said he knows he cannot keep walking to and from work for hours. Transit fares in the winter often cause him grief. He said he hopes he can see life become more affordable, until then, celebrations of cooling inflation rates are merely words.

“I’m hearing this mainly from political pundits or experts,” he said. “I want to see it really translate into my everyday life.”

Gabriela Calugay-Casuga

Gabriela “Gabby” Calugay-Casuga (she/they) is a writer and activist based in so-called “Ottawa.” They began writing for Migrante Ottawa’s radio show, Talakayang Bayan, in 2017. Since then, she...