Everything inflation: It's not just gas and food anymore — and wages aren't keeping up
CBC
Everything seems to be getting more expensive. Food, gas and housing prices are on the rise while paycheques are slow to keep pace. The CBC News series Priced Out explains why you're paying more at the register and how Canadians are coping with the high cost of everything.
Canadians familiar with the way rising prices have been taking a chomp out of their spending power are now facing something worse than what they've encountered so far.
Rising pump prices are now grimly routine. We've grown to expect the effect of shipping delays on food and things with imported components. High housing costs are now just an appalling Canadian fact of life.
But toward the end of 2021, that recognizable pattern of rising prices began to change. Until about three months ago, Canadians apportioning their weekly budgets would have noticed most price increases occurring in a few very distinct, relatively volatile, categories, such as food, fuel and accommodation. Not anymore.
While economists differ on why it is happening and exactly how the change will affect Canadians, all I spoke to agreed on one thing.
"The story is no longer about energy, about food, about housing," said Tu Nguyen, a Toronto-based economist with the consultancy RSM Canada. "It's about pretty much everything in the economy."
It used to be that Canadians trying to keep within a budget could seek out cheaper goods. They could avoid driving when gas was expensive, for example, or alter their diets to cut back on imported food. But when inflation is general, that becomes harder.
According to some economists, it is a sign that inflation may have set in for the longer term and that it will begin to hurt Canadians more.
Those at the low end of the wage scale — including women, recent immigrants and those in precarious work — are more deeply affected by generalized inflation. People with stagnant incomes and weak bargaining power end up paying higher prices, even for the less expensive goods and services they depend on.
New evidence that "everything inflation" has surged arrived in the same Statistics Canada report that showed prices overall were climbing at 5.1 per cent a year, the highest rate since 1991.
But behind that headline number, people like Stephen Tapp, chief economist at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, drew attention to the three ways that Statistics Canada measures something called "core" inflation: an attempt by statisticians to measure underlying movement in prices by chopping out volatile goods.
The strategy, Tapp said, is to exclude prices that tend to rise temporarily, price hikes "that might just unwind and go away" without becoming part of long-term inflation.
What's remarkable about the graph Tapp posted, which is shown below, is that until November, core inflation has been dead on target for years, hovering at about two per cent, while headline inflation — a number with all of the volatile goods still included — has zipped up and down. But suddenly all three core measures have begun to climb, one of them by as much as four per cent, showing that the price of everything is on a rising path.
"Those [core] measures are going to give the Bank of Canada most cause for concern because what they are trying to target is inflation expectations, and expectations have been rising," Tapp said. He's worried there are signs that core is trending even higher.