How serious is food inflation in Canada?
How serious is food inflation in Canada?
By Sylvain Charlebois
Professor, Dalhousie University
If you think food prices are increasing at a much faster pace than what Statistics Canada suggests, you’re likely not imagining it.
For a few years, many Canadians have suspected that the federal agency was either underestimating our food inflation or there was some lag between what was going on at the grocery store and what was reported.
We now know a little more about what’s happening, at least this year.
BetterCart, a Canadian company that monitors food prices across the country daily, has a slightly different reading on how food inflation is impacting Canadians’ food affordability.
BetterCart mines its data from flyers, websites and several other sources to measure the cost of a number of food products. The company has started to compare its data with Statistics Canada’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is published every month. In some cases, variances reported by Statistics Canada are higher but in many cases they’re much lower than what BetterCart is finding.
The investigation continues but evidence suggesting that Statistics Canada is underestimating food inflation is mounting.
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