AI Analysis: Manufacturing sales by industry and province, monthly (dollars unless otherwise noted)

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 16100048 provides over 34 years of monthly manufacturing sales data (January 1992 to January 2026) across 333 NAICS industry categories and 14 Canadian geographies, capturing 107,313 valid sales records with values ranging from $0 to $21.3 billion. The dataset reveals a heavily right-skewed distribution where a small number of dominant industries — concentrated primarily in Ontario and Quebec — drive the bulk of Canada's manufacturing output. Outlier analysis further identifies periods of extreme volatility likely tied to major economic events including the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key Findings

• The dataset contains 107,313 non-null sales records spanning January 1992 to January 2026, with a mean sales value of $175,919 thousand — nearly 9x the median of $20,113 thousand — confirming a heavily right-skewed distribution.
• Sales values range from $0 to a maximum of $21.3 billion, with the top value exceeding the median by more than 1,000x, indicating extreme concentration among a small number of high-output industries.
• The interquartile range spans $4,444 thousand (Q1) to $77,569 thousand (Q3), meaning 50% of all monthly sales records fall within this relatively narrow lower band despite the enormous overall range.
• Ontario and Quebec are the dominant contributors to total Canadian manufacturing sales, as evidenced by the provincial bar chart, reflecting their historically large industrial bases.
• 333 unique NAICS industry classifications are tracked across 14 geographies (10 provinces plus Northwest Territories, Northwest Territories including Nunavut, Nunavut, and Yukon), offering fine-grained sectoral and regional detail.
• Province-level outlier detection flagged multiple instances of month-over-month changes exceeding 50%, with national anomalies likely corresponding to known economic disruptions such as the 2008 financial crisis and 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
• Both unadjusted and seasonally adjusted figures are available, with box plot analysis confirming that seasonal adjustment meaningfully affects the spread and central tendency of reported sales values.