In which the Canadian business press goes out of its way to track down a meaningless piece of information, and interprets it in the worst possible way (h/t to true dough) :

Bloomberg: Canadian Dollar Still Undervalued After Rally, Memorandum Says: The Canadian dollar is undervalued
and doesn’t yet reflect the benefit to the country’s economy from
soaring energy exports, according to an internal Bank of Canada
report written in March.         
      

The currency’s "long-run equilibrium value” is 91 U.S.
cents, central bank researchers Jeannine Bailliu and Ramzi Issa
wrote in a March 27 note to Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge
and his five deputies. The six-page document was obtained by
Bloomberg News under the nation’s Access to Information Act.

The Canadian dollar climbed to a 28-year high of 91.44 cents
on May 31 before retreating to trade at 88.68 cents at 5 p.m. in
Toronto yesterday. The report helps explain why Dodge raised
interest rates in January and March to cool inflation even as
provincial leaders, labor unions and manufacturers protested that
the dollar would strengthen and erode demand for exports.

[emphasis added]

This is just silly:

• No-one in their right mind – and this includes Jeannine Bailliu, Ramzi Issa and anyone who works at the Bank of Canada – would consider this number to be anything but the result of a few hours of fiddling with some off-the-shelf exchange-rate models. Bragging about how you had to use the Access to Information Act in order to get this Top Secret^TM factoid is just embarrassing.
• The Bank of Canada goes to extravagant lengths in order to explain what it is doing and why: explicit inflation targets and regular updates about its views about the state of the economy. To suggest that this Top Secret^TM factoid is the Secret Explanation to understanding the Bank’s behaviour during the past few months is just stupid. Those who took the time to read what the Bank said about what it was going to do and why could predict – with virtual certainty – the Bank’s decisions.