Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much to our witnesses, who have, on short notice, come to help our committee with this study. Thank you for the work you do to give government and policy-makers some timely information.
One of my colleagues was asking about some changes in restating or maybe going back and looking at previous CPI measures, but I'd like to just ask a question about some of the methodology changes we've seen. I note that we've changed the basket weighting and referenced the year 2020, which to me seems a little bit of an interesting choice given that it was quite a different year in terms of some consumption habits.
Aren't we doing two things here? Aren't we kind of understating inflation by shifting weights away from some of these items that have seen significant increases—you mentioned gasoline with 43%—but then also when prices for some of these items, which we've overweighted in terms of consumption because of this weird 2020 year, come down in future years, aren't we going to actually pull down the CPI to a greater degree?
I wonder if you could respond to that. Thank you.