Canadian Personal Finance Blog

The Bank of Canada has kept their key interest rate alone today, making debtors like me breath a collective sigh of relief.

“The bank’s comments point to unchanged policy at the next fixed announcement date on Jan. 16, and likely beyond,” said Bank of Montreal senior economist Sal Guatieri. “We continue to expect rates to remain stable through 2007.”

This makes me a happy debtor for now. Huge rate increases to fight inflation could start a run on “debtors prison” or worse bankruptcies.

What does Led Zeppelin have to do with this? The Song Remains The Same? Come on guys, I can’t fill in the blanks for you all the time, must I?

As my steady readers may have noticed this site’s lay out has changed a little and will continue to evolve. I am actually doing more experimentation on my Beta Blog site (which is really only a mirror of this site, but is on the new Beta Blogspot site). It’s always interesting to figure out what is the best mix of “ads” to content on the site, so please bear (bare?) with me on this one, and if you have any comments on how the site looks, I always appreciate that kind of feedback as well.

So the dust is now settling in the land of Liberal, and I guess it’s time to see which of their financial policies got adopted, so I can figure out who exactly I might vote for in the next election, which my guess would be in April of 2007 (if I am right, remember you read it here first!). There is mention of a few interesting points here including:

• Fiscal Imbalance (26) but this seems to be figuring out how to share money with the provinces.
• Child Poverty (54) which proposes to raise the child tax benefit to $4900 per year, but my guess is that it gets clawed back if you are an affluent rich single income earner like me (opinion, don’t know that for sure).
• Child Care (58) which worries me, since I don’t need child care, other than babysitters occasionally, so this one is going to cost me, I guess.
• Reducing Student Debt (70) good idea, more post secondary funding to lower it’s cost is a good thing.
• Alternate Energy for Rural Folk (116) quite interesting. If you are a farmer, this could be a good thing, having solar and such. After this past weekend’s ice storm, the importance of rural folks being able to be disconnected from the power grid for extended periods seems pretty important.

Have a read of the whole document, there is a lot of lawyer phraseology to fight through but it’s interesting, none the less. It’s always important to understand the party’s policies that affect (effect?) you before you cast your vote, which is coming soon folks, mark my words!!! -C8j