(Bloomberg) -- With less than a month left, Canada’s ETF industry is heading for a blowout year with inflows poised for a record and assets crossing the C$200 billion ($151 billion) mark.

Exchange traded funds attracted C$4.5 billion of investments in November -- the biggest monthly increase for the year -- pushing inflows to C$23 billion in 2019 and inching closer to the record set two years ago at C$26 billion, , according to National Bank of Canada. The iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF, which tracks top stocks, brought in almost C$700 million in November, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“We saw for the first time in a while where equities brought in a lot more money than fixed income,” said Mark Noble, senior vice president for ETF strategy at Horizons ETFs Management (Canada) Inc. “The market seems to have found a little bit more confidence.”

It’s little wonder, stocks surged 3.4% in November, the biggest gain since January. The S&P/TSX Composite Index has climbed 19% this year and on a total returns basis, it’s up 22%.

That helped push assets under management across C$200 billion in the month, National Bank of Canada data show. The industry has doubled its assets in three and a half years, said Daniel Straus, vice president of ETFs and financial products research at the firm.

“A lot of pent up demand for investment found its way back into the market,” he said. Investors had tiptoed back into passive investing this year after the global rout at the end of 2018. “Investor demand was finally released in concert with the holiday season and then you end up having this kind of blind optimism across the board.”

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Politics

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered his Throne Speech where he called on lawmakers to find common ground and said he’d be open to new ideas in order to work with other parties. He also cited climate change and efforts to “strengthen the middle class” as two of the main messages sent by votes in the divisive election in which he lost his majority.

Earlier in the week, Donald Trump called Trudeau “two-faced” after a hot-mic video captured the Canadian prime minister joking about the U.S. president’s extended remarks to reporters at a NATO summit this week.

Economy

Canada posted its biggest monthly job loss in a decade, setting up a test of the Bank of Canada’s resolve to hold off lowering interest rates. Just days earlier, the nation’s central bank stood pat on interest rates, citing a resilience in the nation’s economy that allowed it to “chart its own course in monetary policy.”

Separately, a shipment of paintings and sculptures potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars helped drive an increase in exports in October, Statistics Canada said Thursday. That resulted in the northern nation’s widest surplus with its biggest trading partner since the 2008 financial crisis.

October new housing price data are due on Dec. 12 and Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz -- who announced Friday he won’t seek a second term at the helm of the central bank -- will be speaking at an event in Toronto that day.

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Thirty years ago today, a gunman claiming to fight feminism killed 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montréal in a mass shooting.

(Updates with closing prices.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Divya Balji in Toronto at dbalji1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jacqueline Thorpe at jthorpe23@bloomberg.net, ;Kyung Bok Cho at kcho7@bloomberg.net, Steven Frank

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