AI Analysis: Consumer Price Index, monthly, not seasonally adjusted

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Consumer Price Index dataset (Table 18100004) spans 112 years of monthly data from January 1914 to April 2026, covering 358 product categories across 188,422 records with zero missing values. Canada's All-items CPI rose from 6.0 in 1914 to 168.0 in April 2026 — a 2,700% increase — with price growth visibly accelerating in the post-2020 period. Nearly all CPI categories move in near-perfect lockstep, with an average pairwise correlation of 0.963, confirming that broad inflation forces drive prices across virtually all consumer spending areas simultaneously.

Key Findings

• Canada's All-items CPI (2002=100) surged from 6.0 in January 1914 to 168.0 in April 2026, representing a 2,700% total price increase over 112 years.
• The dataset contains 188,422 records across 358 unique product categories with no missing values, making it one of the most complete long-run economic time series available.
• CPI values range from a minimum of 3.1 to a maximum of 477.0, with a mean of 89.59 and a median of 93.60, reflecting mild left skew driven by very low historical values in the early 20th century.
• The middle 50% of all CPI values fall between 59.9 and 114.8 (an IQR of 54.9), indicating that despite the enormous overall range, the bulk of observations are clustered in a moderate band.
• CPI product groups are overwhelmingly correlated, averaging 0.963 pairwise, with perfect correlations (1.000) observed between All-items, Goods and Services, and All-items (1992=100); the weakest correlations involve Clothing and Footwear.
• Outlier detection identified 41 months with statistically unusual month-over-month CPI changes (|Z-score| > 2.5), with the most extreme anomalies likely tied to the 1970s oil crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2021–2022 post-COVID inflation surge.
• Two index base years are used in the dataset — 2002=100 and 1992=100 — alongside 11 distinct reference period groupings, which accounts for the wide spread of raw CPI values observed across the full distribution.