Finance Committee on March 31st, 2022

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, StatsCan. It's very important information that you guys provide to policy-makers.

I'm going to change it up a bit. I want to talk a bit about large corporations and trying to measure what they're doing relevant to their profits, basically. We've seen huge amounts in the U.S. of 25% profit gains in corporations. In Canada, it was a 37% increase, I believe.

Is there any way that StatsCan can monitor these corporations relevant to price gouging? We know the labour market, labour wages and salaries are not keeping up with the prices that some of these corporations are charging. Is it measured somewhere in the CPI?

[Greg Peterson]

It is not measured so much in the CPI. We have our retail service price index and our wholesale service price index. They are essentially price indices that measure the margins that wholesalers and retailers apply to their customers.

[Technical difficulty—Editor] that would necessarily be consistent with price gouging in those services.

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Is there any way to detect it, or is that made public? We're starting to see.... There are concerns, when you get the President of the United States asking companies not to price gouge. We have oil companies now.... You're seeing the price levels. In my home province, the price of fuel changed 10 times in less than 30 days.

How do you measure it, or how does it become relevant so that a red flag goes up and says, “Hold on a second,” and makes it public?

[Greg Peterson]

If I understand your question correctly, at Statistics Canada we protect the confidentiality of the information we obtain, so we're not in a position to point to an individual company and say, “You're price gouging.”

If I take a look at the data that we have available that indicates where prices or margins are increasing, again, I'd point to the retail service price index and wholesale service price index as sources of that information. [Technical difficulty—Editor]

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I lost the end of your answer, but I'm going to move on quickly.

We've heard from other guests that predatory lending could also be contributing to CPI, so I'm wondering if you could comment on that. Would you have any information to share with us?

[Greg Peterson]

I'll turn to Ms. Ertl.

[Heidi Ertl]

Mr. Chair, could I ask the member to clarify that question?

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

High-risk individuals are getting loans, and were getting them leading up to the pandemic. I'm wondering what contribution.... We call it predatory lending. Is there a measurement tool you use to determine if that's the case?

[Heidi Ertl]

I don't believe so. We are measuring the transactions that are occurring. If we're talking about mortgage lending, as an example, we would be taking into account all of the new mortgages that are initiated in a given month. We do not assess or analyze whether.... We don't have any information to determine whether that's a high-risk loan or not.

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

[Technical difficulty—Editor] result to the question could be, what are the levels of bankruptcies and insolvencies over the past two or three years? Have they increased or decreased?

[Heidi Ertl]

That's a different question. That's not related at all to the CPI.

I'm not sure if we have some information on our business conditions—

[Greg Peterson]

The information regarding bankruptcies, I believe, is published by ISED.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. MacDonald.

Members, we are now moving to our third round. We have Mr. Lawrence for five minutes.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to borrow heavily from a friend of our finance committee, Professor Sylvain Charlebois. He has written a recent article in which he states that the StatsCan website will be refreshing or creating a brand new database regarding the price of food.

Can you confirm that?

[Greg Peterson]

This is outside of the CPI. The CPI remains unchanged.

We have, for some time, produced information on the average prices of food products. In the past, we published a national table and a provincial table. We are going to move those two tables together, into a single product.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

My understanding is that you're actually going to be eliminating from the website, for public consumption, the 25 years of data that has been collected, meaning you will no longer be able to do year over year studies. It seems like a bit of an odd time to [Technical difficulty—Editor] and food prices.

[Greg Peterson]

Absolutely not. We have no intention of removing any data from our website; nor have we ever indicated that we would.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

It said your website “posted a note to readers at the very bottom of its monthly Consumer Price Index report” that it would be removing this data. Is that not true?

[Greg Peterson]

We will no longer update the old table, but we'll archive the old table and the data will be publicly available.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

You won't be able to compare the new data because it's a different grouping of foods or different types of foods from the old data.

[Greg Peterson]

I'll ask Ms. Ertl to talk about the specifics of the changes that were made—

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

No, that's fine. You will not be updating the old basket, which will eliminate the ability to do a year over year comparison at a time when we have the highest food prices. Is that right?

[Greg Peterson]

The CPI basket remains unchanged. We're still covering 178 food commodities. It will be continuous over time, so we'll be able to go back in time and make comparisons for those products.

The average prices are the average price of a product. If they're making comparisons of what's happening over time, we advise people to use the consumer price index as opposed to that collection of selected average prices.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

My point remains the same: On this food table, you will not be able to do year over year comparisons.

This is in striking contrast to your counterparts in the United States and other countries, where they've actually kept the two tables going. They've got the new one, which rightfully reflects perhaps the more modern examples of diet, but they enable you to also continue to track on the old one.

Presuming everything is in today and it's just a matter of updating, why would you not just go ahead and keep updating that on the food table? At a time when we're facing record inflation, people—those in my riding, quite frankly, who are having a difficult time affording food—and academics and others who study this will not have the ability to continue to understand and fully monitor the increase in food prices.

[Greg Peterson]

We would advise that if you want to track increases in food prices, the 178 commodities in the consumer price index be used for making those comparisons. If you're doing that, then you're comparing apples to apples. You're making sure that the size of the cereal box is the same in both periods.