Finance committee  Rental costs are included, so that particular situation is there. As I said, this is a price change, and then we do have complementary measures that start to get at different parts of our country as well as different subsections of our population and how they fare. I'd encourage you to look at those complementary measures.

Finance committee  I think that immediately, as we all went into lockdown post-March, we saw, in fact, deflation first. We saw those numbers go below zero. Then, as we've been discussing, as the economies opened and the restrictions have lifted, we've seen the inflation come back. As was mentioned earlier, the CPI is a year-over-year measure, so you also started to see those base effects starting to come in as you watched that number over the course of the last two years, but as Heidi mentioned, I think we're starting to see those base effects starting to diminish.

Finance committee  I'm not going to speculate, because it's not a “one dimension” reason. There are multiple reasons, as we've discussed before, of which transfers are certainly one of the stimulants, if you like, of consumption. I'm not going to speculate because I don't have that, and maybe others are better positioned to do the what-if scenario than we are.

Finance committee  Thank you for that question. First of all, in the CPI, unlike going to buy groceries that are consumed almost instantaneously, a house is something that one obtains and then gets the value of over time. The second thing one needs to be aware of is that, as I said, there's no question that our housing prices index and resale prices index, on a constant basis in the year after year that we've been measuring, are showing some dramatic increases year over year.

Finance committee  Thank you very much for your question and comments. I am very proud of our colleagues from all over. Like many other public servants, they worked to meet the needs during this rather difficult period. As you mentioned, Statistics Canada has an excellent reputation on the world stage, and I am proud to chair the OECD's Statistics Committee.

Finance committee  Thank you for that. In fact, every year we take stock of how consumption is changing, and we make sure that it's reflective of the weights in the basket so that when we measure that price change, that pure price change, it's reflective of the most current consumption. In addition to that, we also did an alternate CPI by working with the bank and some of the sources of data it has to see if there was any correspondence between real-time shifts even more frequent than yearly to see if there was any big change.

Finance committee  It used to be ad hoc. Then it went to three. Then it went to two. Now it's one and, as I said, even in parallel we're doing more frequent updates.

Finance committee  Our research doesn't show that. In fact, we're getting better at reflecting the price change with consumption. As I said, previously we used to take a price at a certain point in a month, for example. Now we're getting the movie instead of the one time.... As I mentioned, the scanner data we're getting is real-time consumption, so I think we're getting better at reflecting true change.

Finance committee  Yes, and that's the reason we actually put out the CPI for different parts of this country. Again, that basket that I talked about earlier is benchmarked to that consumption weight as well. For example, we know that B.C. had a 3.6% year-over-year change as compared to 4.7% in [Technical difficulty—Editor].

Finance committee  Other organizations establish the standards and we follow them. However, in a situation like ours, we have to personalize some of the CPI subcomponents. For example, obviously, the records, the level or quality of data, the data sources available, and the burden on and resources available to Statistics Canada determine the priorities, methods and data sources that will give us the best numbers.

Finance committee  Certainly. I'll try to address both parts of your question and maybe even ask my colleagues to jump in. The first thing we do is to get a couple of hundred food items from each of the major grocery chains out there. We get millions and millions of actual prices and quantities of what people are buying sent to us at Statistics Canada.

Finance committee  I'm going to reserve judgment on the different aspects. All I can say is, has there been a net transfer from government to households? Yes. Has that resulted in an increased savings rate? The answer is yes. Has it had a disproportionate impact, as we discussed earlier, on regions and parts, on different households and so on?

Finance committee  The ability to consume is the biggest driver, and these are actual costs that people are paying. The source of where that ability to consume is coming from has various aspects to it and, of course, what we're measuring in the CPI is what that change by those components we talked about is.

Finance committee  Thank you very much for your question. No, we do not review the CPI data. Of course, we adjust the seasonal measures after consulting with experts, but the results are the results and we usually do not adjust them. There are several reasons for that. The first has to do with quality.

Finance committee  Again, I can speak to how we do it. Ours is a very stable, rigorous approach over time. We survey tens of thousands of households and find out what they are spending their income on in a typical month, down to a very small differential between what they take in and what they spend, and then that forms the basis, if you like, of the weight within the CPI.