More from Macklem - negative rates would not be terribly helpful at present

Bank of Canada Governor speaking at a parliamentary committee

Earlier:

• BOC's Macklem: Canada rates will stay very low for a very long time

Still going:

• Bank has committed to stop buying gov't bonds when recovery is well underway, most likely before inflation rate hits 2% target
• we have quite a lot of room to buy more government debt
• there are other things we can do, we do have the capacity to do more things if needed; ample potential to scale up QE if that were needed
• negative rates are in our toolkit but they would not be "terribly helpful at this time"
• we could potentially lower the effective lower bound even without going negative, it's at 25 bps, it could be a little bit lower