Receipt — The price of everything: one headline rate, and the components underneath it

A Receipt is a dated evidence summary for one product. It shows the question, the current answer, the sources, the method, the limits, and the next update.

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The question	Does a single headline inflation rate describe the prices a Canadian household is actually paying?
Current reading	One number stands in for the cost of living in almost every public argument about it: in wage bargaining, in arguments about indexation, in the case for and against the next interest-rate decision. That number is an average over a basket whose parts move at very different speeds. A reader who has only the average cannot tell whether price pressure is broad or narrow, whether it is coming from something volatile that tends to unwind or from something that tends to persist, or whether their own pay is keeping up with it. The decomposition that answers those questions is published by the same agency, on the same day, on the same basis as the headline — it is simply less often read.
Evidence reviewed through	2026-08-18
Basis	Statistics Canada's own published Consumer Price Index for Canada, monthly, not seasonally adjusted (table 18-10-0004-01), held here as twenty-two series on one window under a content hash: the all-items index, all eight major components, the shelter detail, the food split, and the goods, services, energy, gasoline, excluding-food-and-energy and excluding-mortgage-interest cuts. Beside them, the Bank of Canada core measures as Statistics Canada publishes them (table 18-10-0256-01), cited as published and never recomputed for display. The purchasing-power line pairs the all-items index with average hourly wages, unadjusted, current dollars (table 14-10-0063-01). Every rate on the product is derived from those held bytes on one frozen convention; nothing is copied from the issuer's own commentary.
Method	Pinned, cited evidence; no scenario is computed — every figure restates a pinned, re-derivable value from the product's member Resolutions.
Confidence	The arithmetic is exact over content-hashed index series, and every rate on the product reproduces from those bytes under one stated convention. What the product deliberately does not settle is the weighting question: which of these components matters most to a given household depends on that household's own spending, and the weights that would answer it are not held here.
Next trigger	The August 2026 Consumer Price Index, confirmed by Statistics Canada for September 14, 2026, which carries the headline, the component decomposition and the three core measures in one release.
Next evidence	Consumer Price Index, August 2026 (confirmed September 14, 2026); Labour Force Survey, August 2026, for the wage side of the purchasing-power reading.
Expiry	Valid until the next monthly Consumer Price Index publishes; a new dated reading is then produced against the new evidence, with this product's correction history intact.

Material definitions

Change over the year is the index for a month divided by the index for the same month a year earlier, less one, expressed as a percent and rounded half away from zero to one decimal — on the percent, never on the index.
A gap between two rates is the difference of the two already-rounded percents, in percentage points. It is never a ratio of levels and never a blended series.
A component's rate is not its contribution. Contribution requires the basket weights (Statistics Canada table 18-10-0007-01), which this record does not hold, so components are ranked against each other by speed and never summed.
CPI rent measures the price of the occupied rental stock, including sitting tenancies. Advertised asking rents measure new lettings only. The two are different populations and are not comparable readings of the same thing.
CPI-trim, CPI-median and CPI-common are Statistics Canada's published year-over-year rates under Bank of Canada definitions. As of the May 2025 CPI release Statistics Canada, not the Bank of Canada, calculates and disseminates them, so the Statistics Canada Open Licence governs their use.
The eight major components are every top-level child of the all-items basket, so ranking them is a decomposition of the whole, not a selection from it.

Decisive limitations

No basket weights are held. Nothing on this product states, or can support, how much of the all-items rate any component supplied.
A basket update took effect with the May 2026 reference month. In the twelve months to July 2026 the three most recent months sit on the updated basket and the other nine predate it — a measurement change inside the comparison window, not a price change.
The Bank of Canada core measures are revisable by design: they rest on seasonally adjusted inputs and, for CPI-common, a factor model re-estimated over all history. The August 17, 2026 release restated CPI-trim for June from 1.8% to 1.9% and several historical CPI-common values. Expected issuer method, not an error.
The held index window begins in August 2006 and the claim floor is July 2006, so the earliest year-over-year comparison available here is August 2007. Statistics Canada's published history runs much further back, and no 'lowest since' or 'first since' statement on this product reaches earlier than the held window.
The energy and gasoline rates are measured against a base month that had itself fallen sharply a year earlier. A large rate in this pair is partly arithmetic about the base and is reported as re-acceleration rather than as a peak.
Wage growth less price growth is a difference of two published rates in percentage points. It is not a real-wage index, not a measure of aggregate household purchasing power, and not adjusted for hours, composition or seasonality.
Adapted from Statistics Canada, table 18-10-0256-01, 2026. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product.

Key sources and licences

Employee wages by industry, monthly, unadjusted — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Consumer Price Index, monthly — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Consumer Price Index, monthly, core measures (Bank of Canada definitions), seasonally adjusted — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full

Every figure this Receipt covers can be reproduced from the named public sources under Countability's published method. If a correction is ever needed, it produces a new dated version rather than editing this one.