AI Analysis: Machinery and equipment price index, by industry of purchase, monthly

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Machinery and Equipment Price Index (Table 18100284) tracks 71 industries monthly from January 1997 to February 2026, revealing that equipment prices have risen 36.6 points overall — from 87.7 to 124.3 — with the most dramatic acceleration occurring post-2020 due to COVID-19 supply chain disruptions and inflation. Across 57,252 observations, the mean index of 96.11 sits just below the 2016 baseline of 100, though 151 data points breach the extreme high threshold of 138.8, all concentrated in recent years. Industries move largely in lockstep, suggesting macroeconomic forces rather than sector-specific dynamics are the primary driver of machinery price changes across Canada.

Key Findings

• The Total Machinery & Equipment Price Index rose from 87.7 in January 1997 to 124.3 in February 2026, a gain of +36.6 points over nearly 30 years, with the sharpest acceleration occurring after 2020.
• 151 data points (out of 57,252) exceed the +3σ outlier threshold of 138.8, all on the high end — zero unusually low values were detected — confirming that extreme anomalies are exclusively a post-2020 inflationary phenomenon.
• The single most extreme data point in the dataset is an index value of 146.6 recorded in Oil Sands Extraction in January 2025, the highest machinery price reading across all industries and time periods.
• Imported machinery shows the widest price range in the dataset (62.3–170.8) compared to domestic equipment (65.5–150.7), indicating greater price volatility likely driven by exchange rate fluctuations and global supply chain exposure.
• Domestic machinery carries a higher average price index (98.72) than imported machinery (94.82), suggesting domestic equipment prices have risen slightly more relative to the 2016 baseline over the full period.
• Correlation analysis across 66 industries reveals predominantly strong positive co-movement, indicating that broad macroeconomic factors — such as global supply chains, commodity prices, and exchange rates — are the primary drivers of machinery price changes rather than industry-specific dynamics.
• The middle 50% of all price index values fall within a relatively narrow band of 85.5 to 102.2 (IQR of 16.7 points), but a right-skewed distribution with a long upper tail reflects the outsized impact of recent high-inflation periods on the overall dataset.