Finance committee  I don't think there's infrastructure missing. I think there's data that's missing, and it would be an understanding of what the consumption patterns are with seniors.

Finance committee  In terms of the basket of goods we use, we change the basket of goods on a periodic basis in order to reflect changes in the consumption patterns of Canadians. If I take as an example what we faced early on in the pandemic, a critique of the CPI early on was that with the closing of stores and the lack of availability of services, the CPI basket didn't properly reflect the consumption patterns of Canadians, so there was a bias.

Finance committee  I would say the answer is yes. It's common practice among national statistical offices to update the consumption basket in the CPIs. We are no different.

Finance committee  Absolutely. However, again, I would caution that there are some commodities that were sold in the 1980s that are no longer sold now—

Finance committee  There were VHS tapes in the basket in the 1980s. Of course, there were no streaming services available back then either.

Finance committee  It depends on the nature of the tax. Maybe I can turn to Ms. Ertl.

Finance committee  You're exactly right: When we take a look at the basket of the consumer price index, it reflects all expenses by all Canadians, aggregated together. A senior won't necessarily face day care expenses or tuition expenses. It is a composite. In order for us to do something like that, it would require us to have very detailed information on what seniors are purchasing, so we'd have to construct a kind of a basket of consumption for seniors.

Finance committee  Certainly. In our agriculture statistics program, we keep very close track of what is being planted, and throughout the growing season we keep track of what we expect crop yield to be by commodity. Canada, of course, is only one producer of these grains, so we also have to consider the production from other global producers, but Canada is a sufficiently large producer in a number of these commodities to have an impact on world prices.

Finance committee  It isn't part of our mandate to forecast inflation. However, we have many ways of analyzing different aspects of supplier chains. supply chains, if you will, like the industrial product price index and the raw materials price index. They offer prices on things that are further up the supply chain.

Finance committee  I can't talk about the last 100 years. I can tell you about the 30 years that I've worked at Statistics Canada, and I can tell you that we haven't been through an economic period like this.

Finance committee  There are a number of different ways. There are a number of things we are keeping track of. When you take a look at the employment numbers, for sure, we've been keeping track of how employment has been changing over the course of the pandemic and the gains we've been seeing in recent months.

Finance committee  To my knowledge, there is nothing particularly on labour market scarring as such. I would, though, point to the national balance sheet accounts, which take a look at how household finances [Technical difficulty—Editor] and we've broken that down by income and wealth quintile.

Finance committee  Certainly. We have data from the national balance sheet accounts that take a look at how household wealth has changed over the course of the pandemic, along with savings rates and disposable income, and we've broken that down by income and wealth quintile.

Finance committee  We'll have a working paper out shortly, but I would be surprised. We currently have used cars in the CPI. The weight of used cars in the basket is less than 2%. They're in the basket. Currently we're using the price of new cars as a proxy for the price of used cars. The—

Finance committee  We haven't done an evaluation, so I wouldn't be qualified to say.