No-one knows how the six members of the Governing Council vote on an interest rate announcement. The Bank of Canada is remarkably opaque in the way it operates as compared to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee or  the US Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee. However the C.D. Howe Institute Monetary Policy Committee meets less than a week before the Bank of Canada’s interest rate announcement. The votes of their eight members are public and give some clue as to where the Bank of Canada may be going, or should be going. Seven of the eight members were in favour of keeping the overnight rate at 0.5% in December, except for Nick Rowe, who wanted to drop it to 0.25%, and the vote for January 18 matched the vote for December 7. In May 2017, all members wanted to have the rate at 0.5%, while in December 2017, half wanted a 0.5% rate and the other half wanted a 0.75% rate. (For some reason the CDHI shows this as a median vote of 0.5%, and not 0.625%.)