The Bank of Canada outlined on Tuesday possible alternative measures of inflation to help guide it when it sets interest rates, but said it would not make any changes to its framework unless really necessary.
"The bar for any major change is high," Deputy Governor Timothy Lane said in the prepared text of a speech he was delivering in Halifax.
Lane also referred to a paper the central bank was publishing simultaneously which found that traditional measures of core inflation based on excluding a fixed group of components "perform relatively poorly."
The official target is to keep overall inflation to 2%, but operationally the bank uses as its guide a core measure of inflation, known as CPIX, that excludes eight volatile components and the effect of indirect tax changes.
That ran at 2.1% in September, but Lane reiterated the bank's new emphasis on what it calls underlying inflation, which it sees at 1.5% to 1.7%, because it excludes exchange rate effects and one-off factors.
He stressed that the bank calculates this underlying trend as its own judgment, and it was not an alternative measure of core inflation.
