AI Analysis: Bank of Canada, assets and liabilities, at month-end

Executive Summary

The Bank of Canada's balance sheet dataset (Statistics Canada, Table 10100108) spans 91 years of monthly data from 1935 to February 2026, covering 47 asset and liability categories across 1,094 observations. The most defining feature of the dataset is the unprecedented balance sheet expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Total Assets peaked at $576,479 million CAD in February 2021 — dwarfing any prior historical level. Since that peak, quantitative tightening has reduced Total Assets to $236,043 million CAD as of February 2026, though the balance sheet remains far larger than pre-pandemic levels.

Key Findings

• Total Assets peaked at $576,479 million CAD in February 2021 due to COVID-19 quantitative easing, representing the single largest value ever recorded in the dataset's 91-year history.
• Total Assets and Total Liabilities are perfectly correlated (r = 1.000), reflecting the fundamental balance sheet accounting identity, while 70 variable pairs across the dataset show strong correlations with |r| > 0.8.
• The data is heavily right-skewed: the overall median value is just $395 million CAD versus a mean of $9,724.67 million CAD, with a standard deviation of $39,475 million CAD — more than four times the mean.
• The strongest negative correlation in the dataset exists between Government of Canada deposits and chartered bank deposits (r = -0.709), suggesting funds systematically shift between these two categories.
• The middle 50% of all values fall between $20 million and $2,756 million CAD (IQR of $2,736 million), indicating that most individual balance sheet line items are relatively modest despite a few extremely large categories.
• Outlier detection using a 3× IQR method on month-over-month percentage changes confirmed that the most statistically extreme balance sheet movements cluster around 2020, with sharp negative outliers also appearing during the subsequent quantitative tightening phase.
• Government of Canada bonds (3 years and under) average $19,921 million CAD and Provincial Bonds average $10,793 million CAD, highlighting government securities as the dominant asset holdings across the Bank's history.