Canadian Chamber of Commerce joins calls for extension of CEBA repayment deadline

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce and a coalition of industry associations have joined calls for the federal government to extend the deadline for small businesses to repay pandemic loans received through the Canada Emergency Business Account program.

A letter to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland on Monday urges her to push back the repayment deadline by two years to the end of 2025, or at least by one year, while allowing businesses to maintain access to the forgivable portion of up to one-third of their loans.

Approximately $49 billion went outto about 900,000 businesses through the program and a spokeswoman for Freeland’s office said earlier this month that 21 per cent of the businesses fully repaid their loans as of May 31 - seven months ahead of the current Dec. 31 deadline.

During the pandemic, the program provided up to $60,000 in interest-free loans to small businesses and not-forprofits, but the chamber says around half of CEBA loan-holder companies are still making below normal revenues.

Matthew Holmes, senior vice-president of policy and government relations for the chamber, says small and mediumsized businesses hit hardest by the pandemic should not be penalized at a time when they are facing pressures such as high interest rates, inflation and increased labour costs.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business said this month that nearly one-fifth of small businesses are at risk of closure without an extension on the repayment of their CEBA loans.

The Canadian Press and are better at gauging underlying price pressures - are still high.

Canada’s inflation rate has returned to the country’s target range after a tumultuous couple of years of soaring prices.

Statistics Canada reported on Tuesday that inflation fell to 2.8 per cent in June, down significantly from the eyepopping peak of 8.1 per cent reached last summer.

That’s within the country’s one to three per cent inflation target and, as Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has boasted, the lowest inflation rate in the G7.

But despite the good news, the Bank of Canada is still in inflation-fighting mode and seems more likely to raise interest rates further than cut them anytime soon.

Earlier this month, the central bank raised its key interest rate again by a quarter percentage point, bringing its key rate to five per cent. At the time, the most recent inflation reading showed the annual rate had fallen to 3.4 per cent in May.

Though the decline in inflation was praised by governor Tiff Macklem, he also issued a warning that the central bank is ready to raise interest rates further if needed.

Lower gasoline prices are responsible for much of the deceleration in inflation so far, while other prices are still rising rapidly. Excluding gasoline prices, Canada’s inflation rate would have been 4.0 per cent in June.

The Bank of Canada’s two preferred core measures of inflation that it tracks closely also show inflation hasn’t eased as much as it might appear, hovering at 3.7 and 3.9 per cent last month.

And with the economy so far outperforming what the central bank and forecasters were anticipating for 2023, the Bank of Canada says it felt it needed to take rates higher.

The central bank’s aggressive approach has not been without pushback, particularly from labour groups and left-leaning economists who have called out the rate hikes as punishment for workers.

Higher interest rates are meant to slow the economy down, which would ultimately come with some job losses.

As extreme heat hits many parts of the world amid a warming climate, millions of people are turning to air conditioners for relief

Research shows that household air conditioning is one of the “most effective adaptation strategies to reduce heat-related mortality and morbidity,” says a Statistics Canada report released this week. That’s particularly the case for older adults and vulnerable populations such as those with mental illness.

But researchers who study climate adaptation say it can also be an unsustainable and problematic solution to extreme heat.

Anabela Bonada, manager and research associate at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, said air conditioning is “absolutely necessary” for vulnerable people who cannot leave their homes.

But, she said, it’s a short-term solution and should be “the last resort — because it leads to more heat, which is what we’re trying to avoid.”

The problems with air conditioning

A study published in The Lancet in 2021, led by Ollie Jay, a professor of heat and health at the University of Sydney in Australia, described air conditioning as a “widespread but unsustainable cooling solution.”

“It’s unsustainable if we want to air condition everybody,” Jennifer Vanos, associate professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and one of the study’s coauthors, said in an interview with CBC News.

The study cited a number of reasons for that.

It heats up cities and the Earth in a few different ways. Firstly, air conditioners are heat pumps that move heat from the inside to the outside of a building. Bonada said that means heat from thousands of homes “is being pumped back out into the city, which is already hotter than surrounding areas.”

Many air conditioners contain refrigerants called HFCs or hydrofluorocarbons, which can cause far more global warming per kilogram than carbon dioxide.

However, most of their global warming impact comes from the amount of electricity they use in places with fossil fuel-powered generation. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), indirect emissions from space cooling have tripled between 1990 and 2021 to more than a gigatonne cont’d on pg. 49

It’s not very accessible to those who need it most. The cost of buying and running air conditioners tends to make them unaffordable to the most vulnerable.

Given the progress made so far, the Bank of Canada’s hawkishness might seem confusing: why raise interest rates even more when inflation has fallen so significantly?

After all, economists know there’s a lag in monetary policy, which means interest rate hikes can take between one to two years to fully affect the economy.

A key element of the answer lies in the Bank of Canada’s commitment to hit the midpoint of its target range.

The central bank has been adamant that it’s aiming for two per cent inflation: not more and not less.

New projections from the Bank of Canada suggest the steady progress made on inflation over the last year will stall. The central bank now expects Canada’s inflation rate to hover around three per cent over the next year, before falling to two per cent by mid-2025.

That means it will take six months longer than the bank previously expected to get back to target.

The Bank of Canada justified its last rate hike in part by pointing to this new projection, which also signals that interest rates are likely to stay higher for longer.

Private-sector economists also expect getting inflation back to two per cent will be challenging and will entail some hiccups along the way.

That’s because core measures of inflation - which strip out volatility

That’s in addition to the hurt being felt by many homeowners, such as those with variable-rate mortgages or those with fixed-rate mortgages that are coming up on renewal.

In a client note sent Friday, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal lays out why the Bank of Canada would prefer being more hawkish than dovish with inflation.

“Give the Bank of Canada two choices: inflation or a recession, and the Bank will take a recession any day. The reason is that central banks have a lot of experience and effective tools to fight recessions, while rising inflation expectations are a central banker’s worst nightmare,” Tal wrote.

“The practical implication of this asymmetric game is that the Bank of Canada is biased.”

The Bank of Canada has repeatedly admitted to that bias in its monetary policy reports, where it lays out risks to its forecasts. It has said on multiple occasions that it’s more concerned that inflation might be stickier than expected than it is about the risk of a global recession, given inflation was already high.

Tal said that bias likely drove the Bank of Canada to overshoot with interest rates as early as in June. But as signs of a weakening economy grow, the economist said the central bank will have to back off at some point.

“The Bank of Canada might hike again in September, but soon enough the current disinflationary forces will be too noticeable to ignore, even for a biased bank.”

The Canadian Press