Chancellor Angela Merkel backed the European Central Bank's insistence on conditions for helping reduce borrowing costs in indebted countries, saying Germany is “in line” with the ECB's approach to defending the euro.

“Obviously time is pressing” on stamping out the debt crisis, though “on many of these issues we feel we're on the right track,” Merkel told reporters in Ottawa yesterday at a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Euro-area policy makers “feel committed to do everything we can to maintain the common currency.”

Asked about ECB chief Mario Draghi's announcement that the central bank may return to sovereign bond-buying, Merkel said recent ECB decisions “have made it clear that the European Central Bank is counting on political action in the form of conditionality as the precondition for a positive development of the euro.”