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Timothy Lane, the longest-serving member of the Bank of Canada’s policy committee, was running around the world on behalf of the International Monetary Fund in 2003. For much of the next week, he will be spending time with Governor Stephen Poloz and the other deputies on the Governing Council to decide if they need to do anything to protect the Canadian economy from the coronavirus outbreak.

“Historical experiences are informative and we’ve certainly looked at that, but, of course, there are going to be differences in each episode,” Lane, who was named a deputy governor in 2009, said in an interview in Montreal on Feb. 24. “One obvious and major difference is that China is a vastly larger share of the world economy now than when we had SARS. But apart from that, it’s a question of how the behaviour might change and that’s something that might be different in different episodes and also depending on how the disease progresses.”

That answer might sound like a dodge, but consider how little headline trade numbers tell us about what’s happening on the ground.

Earlier this month, Statistics Canada said the number of Canadian companies exporting to China increased by more than 400 between 2016 and 2018. And yet, the 10 biggest exporters were responsible for half of those exports. Is Canada more exposed to China than it was two decades ago? Certainly. But what if most of that exposure is through a relatively small number of big, sophisticated corporations that possess the tools and financial might to cushion the blow? If that’s the case, then an interest-rate cut could be an overreaction.