AI Analysis: Wholesale sales, price and volume, by industry, seasonally adjusted

Executive Summary

Canadian wholesale trade grew dramatically over the 22-year period from January 2004 to January 2026, with total wholesale sales rising 226.6% from $35,239M to $115,093M. The dataset, comprising 9,295 records across 42 NAICS industry classifications, captures both nominal and real trade activity through four measure types anchored to a 2012 baseline. Outlier analysis identified significant structural disruptions — including the 2008–2009 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the post-pandemic commodity surge — accounting for roughly 22% of all monthly observations.

Key Findings

• Total Canadian wholesale trade surged 226.6% over 22 years, growing from $35,239M in January 2004 to $115,093M in January 2026, reflecting sustained long-term expansion.
• 59 outliers (~22% of 265 monthly data points) were detected using Z-score and IQR methods, with clusters likely tied to the 2008–2009 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic shock in 2020, and the post-pandemic commodity price surge in 2021–2022.
• Wholesale sales in current prices showed the widest variability among the four measure types, with values ranging from $35,239M to $138,456M and a standard deviation of ~$27,670M.
• The Fisher Chained Price Index remained relatively stable, ranging narrowly from 85.4 to 137.7 with a mean of 107.0, indicating moderate price-level changes around the 2012 base year.
• The dataset tracks 42 unique NAICS industry classifications, with the top 15 industries ranked by average sales revealing a single dominant wholesale segment that clearly outpaces all others.
• Correlation analysis found that the actual wholesale VALUE variable has only weak correlations (r ≈ ±0.15) with metadata fields, while SCALAR_ID, UOM_ID, and DECIMALS share perfect correlations (|r| = 1.0) among themselves — confirming these are structural coding relationships rather than meaningful trade signals.
• Wholesale sales at 2012 constant prices contained the largest subset of records (7,411 observations) with the broadest range ($22M to $125,866M), reflecting the high degree of size variation across individual industry-level breakdowns.