The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that the Bank of Canada plans to halt the shrinking of its balance sheet soon, ending its significant bond market interventions that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Globe's Mark Rendell writes that in a speech deputy governor Toni Gravelle announced that the BOC will wind down its quantitative tightening (QT) program in the first half of this year and will resume asset purchases to stabilize its balance sheet. Since 2022, the BOC has been letting the bonds it purchased early in the pandemic roll off its balance sheet as they mature without buying more. That means both sides of the bank's balance sheet -- its bond holdings and the reserves it created to pay for the bonds -- have been declining. Mr. Gravelle's speech was mostly about financial plumbing, and offered no guidance on interest rates ahead of the BOC's next monetary policy decision on Jan. 29. When it comes to the end of QT, the BOC plans to maintain the amount of settlement balances in Canada's financial system at about $50-billion to $70-billion. That is higher than the bank's previous steady-state estimate of $20-billion to $60-billion. On Friday the BOC releases a postmortem on its pandemic response.