Mr. Speaker, as I said, the second characteristic of a tax is that it adds to the cost of some goods, services and transactions.
Just today, Statistics Canada released fresh data showing what consumers have known for months; that inflation has rocketed up to 3.6%, well above the Bank of Canada's 2% target. This data was essential to my argument today, thus one of the reasons why I waited for its publication before presenting this.
As of this morning, three of four measures of the Bank of Canada for inflation show that inflation has breached the 2% target. Several product groups were well above that. Gasoline is up 43.4%; home ownership replacement costs, 11.3%; and durable goods, which includes things like cars, appliances and furniture, is up 5%. That is just to name a few. This is demonstrated proof that people are, in fact, paying the cost of the inflation tax.
Food prices are also on sharp rise. According to the latest Canada Food Price Report, food costs increased 2.3% last year, with an expected 4.5% to 6.5% increase in meat, 3.5% to 5.5% increase in bakery and 4.5% to 6.5% increase in vegetables this year.
Housing prices have ballooned 30% from March 2020 to March 2021. This is where the cause and effect is most evident. COVID should have reduced housing prices. The wages with which people buy houses dropped. People lost their jobs, making it harder to place offers on homes. To escape lockdowns, more people moved to the countryside, where prices per square foot are lower. Immigration came to a halt, reducing the number of buyers in the market. All these factors would have driven demand and therefore prices down.
In fact, the country's top housing regulator, CMHC, predicted prices would drop as much as 14% for those reasons, and they did begin to drop in March and April of last year. Then, suddenly, as the Bank of Canada's increase in the money supply began flooding into the market, prices began to reverse. The government pumped $356 billion of brand new, newly created cash into the system, and that was exactly the size of the deficit and the size of the money supply growth—