Yes, it is exactly as you've outlined. Through the pandemic, for services people wanted to buy and consume, they couldn't do it because that required close contact, so what happened was that people substituted that with goods. They couldn't go to the gym, so they bought home fitness equipment. They couldn't go to restaurants, so they bought better kitchen equipment. You could see this in the housing market in general. Many Canadians were working at home, their children were going to school at home and all the recreation was at home. Not surprisingly, they wanted bigger houses. That showed up in the housing market. If you want a bigger house, you want more furniture and new appliances.
Usually during recessions it's these durable goods that get hit more, because you can keep your old couch a little longer, but during the pandemic you were sitting on it all day. You were using it a lot more. It was very unusual, this big shift in demand for goods, and it wasn't just in Canada, it was globally. The effect of the very strong demand for goods, with these disrupted supply chains, is that we've seen very large increases in the prices of these goods.
As the pandemic recedes, we actually think that there will be some natural rebalancing of demand. We're already seeing it. People want to get back to going to the gym, going to their local restaurant and getting out, so what we expect to see is that the demand for goods will diminish as the consumption of services increases.
Now, overall, though, demand is running ahead of supply, so the average of that has to grow more slowly going forward than it's grown in the past, or else we're going to have ongoing inflationary pressures, so there are two things going on. We are looking very closely at this rotation from goods to services.
So far, what we've seen is a strong rebound in services. We're not seeing much reduction in demand for goods, and some of that may be related to these supply constraints. If you're trying to buy a car, well, it may take six months for you to get that car and for that sale to show up. We're not seeing yet much reduction in demand, and that's one of the reasons why the economy is strong. Hopefully, as those supply constraints diminish, people get the goods they wanted and we start to see more rebalancing. That's something we'll be watching closely.