AI Analysis: Industrial product price index, by industry, monthly

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Industrial Product Price Index (Table 18100267) spans 70 years of monthly data across 294 NAICS industries, revealing a remarkable 899.5% average price increase from 13.3 in January 1956 to 132.9 in March 2026 (base year 2020=100). The overall distribution is nearly symmetric (mean 91.9, median 91.6) with most industries showing strong positive correlations, reflecting shared long-term inflationary trends. Key anomalies align with major economic events, including the 1970s oil crisis and the 2021–2022 post-COVID supply chain disruptions.

Key Findings

• The dataset covers 843 monthly periods from January 1956 to March 2026, encompassing 100,850 records across 294 unique NAICS industry classifications.
• The average industrial product price index surged 899.5%, rising from 13.3 in early 1956 to 132.9 in March 2026, reflecting decades of cumulative inflation across Canadian industries.
• Index values range widely from 13.3 to 314.3, but the middle 50% of observations fall within a relatively tight band of 79.0 to 101.2, with a standard deviation of 22.2.
• 31 out of 843 months (3.7%) were flagged as anomalous, with the largest year-over-year surge reaching +21.5% in November 1974 and the steepest drop hitting approximately -14.2% in mid-1979, both tied to oil crisis dynamics.
• Most of the 15 top NAICS industries show strong positive price correlations over time, indicating that broad macroeconomic forces — rather than industry-specific factors — drive the majority of price movements.
• Only 8 industry-level data points across the top 10 industries were extreme statistical outliers (|z-score| > 3), suggesting that unusual price movements are predominantly market-wide rather than sector-specific.
• The dataset is updated monthly and was last refreshed on April 23, 2026, providing a continuously current national-level view of Canadian industrial pricing with no regional breakdown available.