and research issues that we ’ ll have to tackle and that motivated us to create this plan. 2 this will lead me to explain how we ’ ll get past the obstacles to new ideas by changing our corporate culture. finally, i ’ m going to ask every three years, the bank sets a strategic course for the medium term. our current plan, which was adopted in june, is outlined in the bank of canada ’ s 2016 – 18 medium - term plan and can be found at http : / / www. bankofcanada. ca / wp - content / uploads / 2015 / 06 / central - banking - new - era - mtp - 2016 – 18. pdf. not surprisingly, the bank ’ s strategy was built by answering questions similar to those proposed by former rotman dean roger martin in his book with a. g. lafley, playing to win : what is the bank hoping to achieve? what areas will it focus on? how will we get better results in these areas? what tools do we need to get there? what does the bank ’ s senior management need to do to support our strategy? bis central bankers ’ speeches you – and all the people who care about what the bank does – to get involved in a constructive dialogue. questioning the answers the bank of canada was itself an innovation when it was created during the great depression to support the economic and financial well - being of canadians. over the past 80 years, the bank has done exactly that by carrying out four main lines of business. you know about our monetary policy role, because you read about how we set interest rates to return the economy to its potential and meet our inflation target of 2 per cent. in our financial stability role, we monitor the health of the canadian financial system and act as the lender of last resort. one example of this work is the extraordinary liquidity that we provided to the system during the 2008 crisis. we ’ re also the federal government ’ s fiscal agent, which means that we manage about $ 650 billion in federal debt and around $ 70 billion in foreign reserves. finally, we ’ re responsible for the bank notes in your wallet. more work goes into them than might be evident : developing new security features, combating counterfeiting and researching new trends in electronic payments and digital currencies. those responsibilities, combined with a balance sheet of nearly $ 100 billion, put the bank at the heart of the canadian financial system. even though the bank has

industries. here, i ’ m thinking about things like peer - to - peer home rental services such as vrbo and mediated services such as uber. these types of trends raise questions for the bank. consider a cashless society where everyone uses e - money, which is monetary value stored electronically and not linked to a bank account. if this money were denominated in canadian dollars, who should issue it? who should earn the seigniorage? 13 the central bank, as it does today, or the private sector? what would the financial system look like in each case? the bank needs to consider all these questions. cash is a public good that many people still prefer, especially for smaller transactions. 14 as we think about alternative futures, we have to envision a world in which people mostly use e - money, perhaps even one that ’ s not denominated in a national currency, such as bitcoin. j. chapman, j. chiu, s. jafri and h. perez saiz, “ public policy objectives and the next generation of cpa systems : an analytical framework, ” discussion paper no. 2015 – 6, bank of canada, 2015. seigniorage is the revenue earned from the issue of money. in 2014, the bank of canada ’ s seigniorage was about $ 1. 3 billion. b. fung, k. huynh and g. stuber, “ the use of cash in canada, ” bank of canada review ( spring 2015 ) : 45 – 56. bis central bankers ’ speeches this would create a new dynamic in the global monetary order, one in which central banks would struggle to implement monetary policy. and, central banks couldn ’ t act as lenders of last resort as they do for their own currencies. this means that households and businesses could suffer important losses if such an e - money were to crash. we need to anticipate this and manage the risks and benefits that could arise from the broader adoption of e - money. the bank will explore these and many other trends over the course of our three - year corporate plan. to do this, we ’ re expanding the range of techniques we use for analysis. for example, we ’ ve begun to capitalize on “ big data ” to do things that aren ’ t possible with traditional economic statistics. prices collected from retail websites can be used to study pricing behaviour. social media used by people of all ages to express likes