AI Analysis: Monthly retail trade sales by province and territory

Executive Summary

Canadian monthly retail trade sales grew 47.3% over nine years, rising from January 2017 to a peak of $76.3B in May 2025, before settling at $60.9B in January 2026, with the sharpest disruption occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic low of $37.1B in April 2020. The dataset spans 109 months across 23 regions and 30 NAICS retail categories, revealing extreme variation between large provinces like Ontario and Quebec and smaller territories. Retail sales are strongly right-skewed, with a mean of ~$1.2B but a median of only ~$165M, reflecting the outsized influence of high-volume regions and Canada-wide aggregates.

Key Findings

• Canada's total retail sales grew 47.3% from January 2017 to January 2026, reaching an all-time high of $76.3B in May 2025.
• The COVID-19 pandemic caused the sharpest single disruption in the dataset, driving national retail sales to a low of $37.1B in April 2020 — a dramatic dip also visible in provincial outlier analysis.
• The distribution of sales values is heavily right-skewed, with a mean of ~$1.2B versus a median of ~$165M across 65,793 valid records, and a standard deviation of ~$4.3B reflecting extreme variability across regions.
• Six months in Canada's retail history were flagged as statistical outliers using a rolling z-score method (|z| > 2.0), with several provinces also experiencing month-over-month swings exceeding ±20%.
• Ontario and Quebec consistently lead all provinces in average monthly retail sales, while smaller territories anchor the bottom of the provincial rankings, illustrating a wide geographic disparity in retail activity.
• Most of the 30 NAICS retail categories show strong positive correlations with one another, indicating they broadly follow the same economic cycle, though a subset of counter-cyclical categories diverges from this trend.
• Retail e-commerce sales represent a distinct and comparably smaller segment within the dataset, tracked alongside total retail sales across 738 unique data series updated as recently as March 20, 2026.