AI Analysis: Consumer Price Index (CPI) statistics, measures of core inflation and other related statistics - Bank of Canada definitions

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 18100256 provides over 77 years of monthly Canadian inflation data (January 1949 to February 2026), tracking 13 distinct Bank of Canada core inflation measures across 6,606 observations. The dataset reveals significant long-term price level changes — with values ranging from 0.60 to 222.10 and a mean of 86.58 — capturing major inflationary episodes including the 1970s oil shock, the high-inflation 1980s, and the post-pandemic surge of 2021–2022. Multiple complementary measures such as CPI-trim, CPI-median, and CPI-common show strong mutual correlation, collectively offering a robust multi-methodology view of Canada's core inflation history.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 926 months (January 1949 to February 2026) with 6,606 observations across 13 distinct Bank of Canada core inflation measures, making it one of the longest available Canadian inflation records.
• CPI values range from a minimum of 0.60 to a maximum of 222.10, with a mean of 86.58 and a median of 96.95, indicating a left-skewed distribution driven by lower historical values in earlier decades.
• The standard deviation of 54.49 reflects high variability across measures and time periods, consistent with a dataset capturing over 75 years of structural economic change.
• 47 outlier data points were identified using a conservative 3× IQR rule, with anomalies clustering around the early 1970s oil shock, the early 1980s high-inflation era, and the 2021–2022 post-COVID inflation surge.
• Core inflation measures — including CPI-trim, CPI-median, and CPI-common — are strongly positively correlated with one another, as confirmed by the correlation heatmap, reflecting their shared underlying methodology of tracking broad price trends.
• Three units of measurement are used across the 13 measures (Percent, 2002=100 index, and 1989=100 index), allowing both rate-of-change and price-level comparisons across different baseline periods.
• The dataset is updated monthly and was last refreshed on March 16, 2026, ensuring it includes the most current available inflation data for policy and research use.