Inflation Rate YoY

Canada Inflation Rate YoY is the 12-month % change in the all-items Consumer Price Index (CPI), a fixed basket tracking pure price change. Statistics Canada (StatCan), the federal statistical agency, runs it monthly since 1914 with 2002 as the 100 reference level and over 1,000,000 quotes. It covers urban and rural private households, uses final prices with GST/HST and sales taxes, and holds quantity and quality fixed. It does not compare price levels across provinces or cities and does not track a changing living standard.

Most items are priced once in the first 2 weeks, food in the first 3 weeks and gasoline in all 4 weeks. It is published monthly in The Daily, the StatCan bulletin, on weekdays at 8:30 AM Eastern, about 2 to 4 weeks after month end. The release adds component, provincial and core tables plus contributors on pre-set dates, while raw indexes stay fixed and adjusted values can be revised. Markets watch the 12-month change against the Bank of Canada 2% midpoint in the 1% to 3% range, using CPI-trim, CPI-median and CPI-common for trend.

The basket holds 8 parts; these 6 carry the most weight.

• Shelter, 29.12%: owned and rented housing plus utilities, with mortgage interest, replacement cost, rent and other costs.
• Transportation, 17.29%: vehicle purchase and operation, gasoline, air travel, transit and vehicle insurance.
• Food, 16.72%: store food 10.75% such as meat, bakery, fruit and drinks plus restaurant meals 5.97%.
• Household operations, furnishings and equipment, 13.28%: telecom, internet, cellular, household goods and services.
• Recreation, education and reading, 10.16%: travel, recreation goods and services, tuition and reading material.
• Health, clothing and alcohol, 13.44%: health goods and care including health at 5.06%, plus clothing, alcohol, tobacco and cannabis.

The June 2022 release, published July 20, 2022, showed 8.1% YoY after 7.7%, the largest gain since January 1983. Gains were broad, with 7 of 8 parts up 3% or more, while gasoline rose 54.6% after 48.0%. Without gasoline the index rose 6.5% after 6.3%, so the volatile part added about 1.6 points to the headline. Shelter cooled, with mortgage interest down 0.6% YoY and replacement cost at 10.0%, while the index rose 0.7% and wages rose 5.2% over 12 months.

1. Product offers: Identical offers are tracked over time with equal weight, forming about 645 classes in 19 strata.
2. Jevons formula: Each small class uses a geometric mean of monthly price relatives, in use since 1995. For 3 relatives 1.02, 1.04 and 1.06, the mean is about 1.0399, or about 4.0%.
3. Matched model: Quality changes are adjusted, so only pure price change enters, with about 75% from observed prices.
4. Lowe formula: Small indexes feed a fixed-weight arithmetic mean with frozen quantities, linked at each update. The official base is 2002=100.
5. Year-over-year rate: The rate divides the 12-month index gain by the year-ago index and multiplies by 100. For 158.0 rising to 170.8, a gain of 12.8, it is about 8.1%, while 6% shelter alone adds about 1.75 points.
6. Seasonal adjustment: National totals and parts are adjusted directly with X-12-ARIMA, leaving flat series unchanged. It gives 15 adjusted series at the national level.