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So while the Bank of Canada's monetary statement shows that people in this country are getting increasingly nervous, Statistics Canada's report on inflows of foreign investment shows that, compared with a lot of other options, Canada has been looking like a (relative) bastion of happy stability.

The monthly international securities transactions report, released Tuesday, shows that foreign investors increased their Canadian stock, bond and money-market holdings by a whopping $15-billion in November, the biggest net inflow in six months.

Tellingly, the net inflows into Canadian bonds and money markets (essentially, cash holdings) made up for the vast bulk of the total - nearly $12-billion.

This illustrates the big attraction of the Canadian market in November - a time when Europe's sovereign debt woes spread in a big way to Italy, re-igniting fears of the potential for a global debt crisis. Foreign investors raced to park their money in safe harbours - and we are considered one such harbour.

This was really the continuation of a risk-flight move of foreign money into Canadian capital markets that has been going on throughout the European debt crisis. Bond and money-market net inflows totalled nearly $70-billion in the first 11 months of 2011. Inflows for the same period a year earlier topped $94-billion.

The inflow into Canadian equities have been more subdued, but still positive: $3.1-billion in November, $18.8-billion for the year-to-date.

What we've been seeing is a view by foreign investors that Canada has a safe, well-managed, low-risk financial market, relatively low sovereign debt levels, and an economy with decent growth prospects. Compared with the rest of the industrialized world, that amounts to glowing praise right now.

While Canada's growth outlook, as the Bank of Canada noted, are somewhat cloudy given the global outlook, it certainly helps the Canadian equity market that it is weighted so heavily toward energy stocks - much more so than Canada's actual economy is, in fact. Oil seems to be one commodity determined to defy the gravitational pull of a weak global growth outlook and remain priced around $100 (U.S.) a barrel, a very profitable level for oil-producer stocks.

Meanwhile, regardless of the economic prospects, there's little doubt that cash and bond holdings look more safe and stable in Canada than in a lot of other places an investor could name. As long as Europe is in debt chaos, this thinking could keep the foreign inflows coming for a while.

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