Canada · Monthly reference build
A compact view of retail sales, digital share, consumer prices, currency, and the policy rate—without hiding source lags or revisions.
Dataset as of:
Chart suppressed
The Data Lab fails closed when a required source is missing or past its freshness limit. We keep attribution and health evidence visible, but do not render a chart from stale data.
Affected source IDs: statcan-retail-sales, statcan-ecommerce-sales, statcan-cpi, boc-fx-usd-cad, boc-policy-rate
Health checked:
Methodology
Retail and e-commerce values use the locked Statistics Canada WDS vectors and source scalar factors, normalized to CA$ millions. The two series join on their latest common reference month.
E-commerce share is e-commerce sales divided by total retail sales. Year-over-year changes compare the same month one year earlier. Daily USD/CAD values are averaged by month for the joined monthly series.
CPI is context, not a retail-specific deflator. FX and policy-rate observations can have a later date than the monthly retail period and are not presented as causes of that month's movement. These current-dollar sales do not separate volume, price, and product mix.
Deflated growth, where shown, uses the Consumer Price Index, all-items, Canada (2002=100) — not a retail-specific deflator, and not seasonally adjusted while the sales series are. Deflated comparisons are therefore year-over-year only, so both bases compare the same calendar month, and nominal always equals deflated plus deflator exactly in log points.
Retail and e-commerce sales are both seasonally adjusted members of the same Statistics Canada table, which is what makes their additive contribution arithmetic valid; the contribution view is suppressed unless both sources declare seasonal adjustment. The monthly note above is updated once per Statistics Canada retail trade release: numbers come from a generated facts pack, prose is written and signed off by a human, and no causal interpretation is generated automatically.
Provenance
Read the versioned JSON dataset endpoint. Source “data as of” timestamps are distinct from GuildBuild fetch times.
Adapted from Statistics Canada, Table 20-10-0056-01, Monthly retail trade sales by province and territory, reference date unavailable. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product.
Adapted from Statistics Canada, Table 20-10-0056-01, Monthly retail trade sales by province and territory, reference date unavailable. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product.
Adapted from Statistics Canada, Table 18-10-0004-01, Consumer Price Index, monthly, not seasonally adjusted, reference date unavailable. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product.
Source: Bank of Canada, Bank of Canada USD/CAD daily average exchange rate, reference date unavailable. GuildBuild transformed the source observations; the Bank of Canada does not endorse this product.
Bank of Canada content in this product was obtained from bankofcanada.ca and is available there free of charge.
Source: Bank of Canada, Bank of Canada target for the overnight rate, reference date unavailable. GuildBuild transformed the source observations; the Bank of Canada does not endorse this product.
Bank of Canada content in this product was obtained from bankofcanada.ca and is available there free of charge.