AI Analysis: Historical (real-time) releases of Consumer Price Index (CPI) statistics, measures of core inflation - Bank of Canada definitions

Executive Summary

This Statistics Canada dataset (Table 18100259) provides a 37-year real-time record of five Bank of Canada core inflation measures from January 1989 to February 2026, spanning 248,583 rows across 112 official release snapshots and 446 reference periods. All three rate-based measures have converged toward the 2–2.4% range by early 2026, down from highs of 3.4–4.9% in 1990, with the post-2021 inflation surge standing out as the most statistically anomalous period in the entire dataset. The vintage structure of the data makes it uniquely valuable for central bank research, enabling analysts to reconstruct exactly what policymakers observed at each decision point rather than relying on revised figures.

Key Findings

• The dataset contains 248,583 rows covering 446 unique reference periods and 112 official release snapshots, enabling detailed study of how inflation estimates were revised over time.
• Five core inflation measures are tracked: CPI-common (factor model), CPI-median (weighted median), and CPI-trim (trimmed mean) — available as year-over-year percent changes, with CPI-median and CPI-trim also available as index values (1989=100).
• All three rate-based measures started above 3.4–4.9% in 1990 and have converged to the 2.0–2.4% range by February 2026, broadly aligning with the Bank of Canada's 2% inflation target.
• The CPI-common (factor model) measure has a mean of 1.98% across 42,392 observations, with values ranging from 0.5% to 6.8%, making the post-2021 spike especially anomalous against the long-run baseline.
• Index-level measures (CPI-median and CPI-trim) have grown from a base of 100 in 1989 to approximately 218–222 by 2026, with means around 145–147, reflecting cumulative price level increases over 37 years.
• A conservative 3× IQR outlier detection method flagged 5,273 data points as extreme anomalies, with the most pronounced deviations clustering around the post-2021 inflation surge.
• Of the 248,583 total rows, 149,121 use percent as the unit of measure and 99,462 use the 1989=100 index base, distributed across 560 unique time series vectors.