China should relax forex rates faster: Flaherty

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(Reuters)

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada would like China to speed up the process of relaxing restrictions on its currency, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Thursday.

"They have a position that they are relaxing their currency, relaxing the restrictions on their currency gradually over time," he said.

"In their view, that's satisfactory and in the view of some of us -- including Canada -- it ought to be done more quickly," he told reporters ahead of a meeting of G7 finance ministers in Istanbul.

Though the G7 talks will focus on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings that will be going on in Istanbul, he said they were also likely to broach currency volatility.

"That is an issue that we regularly discuss in the G7 with respect to stresses that arise out of some of the currencies that are not market-based currencies. I expect we'll talk about it again," he said.

The G7 has been overshadowed by recent G20 meetings and by a G20 decision to shift economic decision-making primarily to the broader group.

Because of that shift in emphasis, Flaherty said the Istanbul G7 session may not produce a communique.

"I'm not sure whether we'll do a communique or not. The reason I say that is the G7 ministers just met as part of the G20 leadership in Pittsburgh last week and we met two weeks before that in London. So we've had a lot of meetings recently with very substantial communiques coming out of this," he said.

"This is a short meeting of the G7 ministers in Istanbul. We're concentrating on the IMF meeting, the World Bank meetings this week."

(Reporting by David Ljunggren and Randall Palmer; editing by Rob Wilson)