Article content continued

“So, all those factors together push back the need for any potential adjustment, any potential tightening, but this is still the ultimate direction,” Mr. Carney, the Bank of Canada governor, said Wednesday.

But, “I’m not going to categorically rule out anything,” he told reporters in Ottawa. “At a point in the future . . . we’ll adjust monetary policy, including guidance, as appropriate, in order to meet our inflation target.”

That inflation target is 2%, and it is nowhere near that level at the moment. Prices were up just 0.8% year-over-year in November and it is unlikely they moved much higher in December — we’ll find that out Friday, when Statistics Canada delivers that month’s inflation report.

Looking ahead, the Bank of Canada says inflation will stay below 2% until the third quarter of 2014.

So, as expected, the bank kept a lid on borrowing costs, with its trendsetting overnight rate — the main instrument used to guide inflation toward the bank’s target — remaining at a near-record low 1%, unchanged since September 2010, the longest dormant stretch since the early 1950s.

What has changed, though, is the way the central bank delivers that message.

For the first time, policymakers on Wednesday combined their regular-rate decision announcement with the bank’s Monetary Policy Report , a closely watched quarterly reading on domestic and global factors affecting the economy.

But the only new wrinkles in the bank’s usually pact statement accompanying a rate announcement highlighted “the more muted inflation outlook and the beginning of a more constructive evolution of imbalances in the household sector,” and that “the timing of any such withdrawal is less imminent than previously anticipated.”