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	2026-10-19
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 October 2026 Consumer Price Index, scheduled for November 16 in the captured September issuer release, or a revision to the incorporated observations.
Next evidence	October CPI on November 16, 2026. Reference month, issuer release and Countability assessment remain distinct.
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

Component growth is not a contribution to headline inflation. No basket weights are held or used here; component rates are never added.
The May 2026 basket update lies inside this annual comparison. Five monthly reference periods from May through September use the updated basket; the other seven predate it. This count does not measure a basket-update effect on inflation.
CPI rent covers the occupied rental stock, including existing tenancies. Advertised asking rents concern a different population.
Core measures are published as revisable. In the earlier August edition, the September 14 capture added August and revised six earlier CPI-common values. The headline/component series had no revisions to retained observations in that comparison; an observation rolling out of the capture window is not an issuer deletion.
Adapted from Statistics Canada, table 18-10-0256-01, 2026. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product. Headline and component indexes use table 18-10-0004-01; wages use table 14-10-0063-01.
The current captured monthly index window begins in September 2006. Its first available year-over-year comparison is September 2007. This is the held window, not the full history published by Statistics Canada.
Wage growth less CPI growth is a difference of rounded rates in percentage points. The separate wage-and-price level comparison uses a compounded ratio. Neither estimates each household’s purchasing power; average wages are unadjusted and composition-sensitive.
Energy and gasoline annual rates depend on both the current index and the year-earlier base. For the retained earlier August reading, in August 2025 those indexes had fallen 8.3% and 12.7% respectively from August 2024. The August 2026 rates therefore compare with a depressed base; this does not quantify a separate contribution to inflation.

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

This Receipt names the public sources and method needed to reproduce the figures it covers. Corrections are dated and explained, with the earlier published record retained.