In an uncertain world, there are few countries that offer investors a lower level of risk than Canada, according to HSBC's Canadian economist Stewart Hall.Toronto-based Mr Hall, who visited Bermuda yesterday to speak with HSBC Bermuda staff and investors, said in an interview that the commodities-rich northern neighbour of the US had come through the global financial turmoil of the recent years pretty much unscathed.“There's a lot of interest in the Canadian economic story, because Canada did not have a financial crisis to speak of,” Mr Hall said in an interview.“There was no housing crisis and no fiscal difficulties. In terms of debt to GDP [gross domestic product] ratio, Canada is on the low 30s. So you get the sense that there is very limited sovereign event risk.“That's rather appealing when you have so many countries with fiscal challenges.”He expected the Canadian dollar - trading at US$1.03 on the currency markets as of yesterday afternoon - to move towards parity over the next couple of quarters.Canada is blessed with abundant natural resources another factor which has helped to buoy its economy, especially the prices of commodities like oil and gold having soared this year.For all the talk of emerging economies driving commodities demand, Mr Hall said he saw Canada as principally a regional market with the US its major customer.A pipeline from the Rockies to the Asian markets was being debated, he added. Whether or not the project materialised, Canada would remain a major player regionally.Natural gas was one commodity that may not prove as lucrative as previously anticipated, he said, thanks to technological developments in tapping “tight gas”, trapped in shale in several parts of the US Midwest. This had allowed the Americans to access more of their own resources and so had reduced the demand for and the price of natural gas from Canada.As for the global economic outlook, Mr Hall did not expect fireworks this year. “In terms of growth the outlook is fairly subdued in the G7 countries,” he said.“In the likes of Europe and the UK, we're seeing a lot of fiscal tightening as governments deploy austerity measures.”In the higher growth, emerging economies, Mr Hall saw increasing evidence of the likes of China and Latin America decoupling their economic fortunes from those of developed economies. In other words, economic growth powered by domestic demand and emerging economies trading with each other were developing trends.