Finance committee  Again, it depends on the commodity. We do use hedonic pricing. Maybe I could turn to Ms. Ertl to give us examples of where we do that.

Finance committee  The information regarding bankruptcies, I believe, is published by ISED.

Finance committee  This is outside of the CPI. The CPI remains unchanged. We have, for some time, produced information on the average prices of food products. In the past, we published a national table and a provincial table. We are going to move those two tables together, into a single product.

Finance committee  Absolutely not. We have no intention of removing any data from our website; nor have we ever indicated that we would.

Finance committee  We will no longer update the old table, but we'll archive the old table and the data will be publicly available.

Finance committee  I'll ask Ms. Ertl to talk about the specifics of the changes that were made—

Finance committee  The CPI basket remains unchanged. We're still covering 178 food commodities. It will be continuous over time, so we'll be able to go back in time and make comparisons for those products. The average prices are the average price of a product. If they're making comparisons of what's happening over time, we advise people to use the consumer price index as opposed to that collection of selected average prices.

Finance committee  We would advise that if you want to track increases in food prices, the 178 commodities in the consumer price index be used for making those comparisons. If you're doing that, then you're comparing apples to apples. You're making sure that the size of the cereal box is the same in both periods.

Finance committee  I'm sorry. Could you repeat the question?

Finance committee  I was pointing to data where we have hard numbers. When we take a look at the composition of inflation and what causes inflation, largely our analysis is focused on supply chain issues. I was referring to data from a national balance sheet account, where we're looking at the change in the wealth of households over time on a disaggregated basis by income quintile and wealth quintile.

Finance committee  We've seen over the course of the pandemic that household wealth has increased. We have a large increase in savings rates across all income quintiles. That would put households in a position to buy more stuff, yes.

Finance committee  It is not measured so much in the CPI. We have our retail service price index and our wholesale service price index. They are essentially price indices that measure the margins that wholesalers and retailers apply to their customers. [Technical difficulty—Editor] that would necessarily be consistent with price gouging in those services.

Finance committee  If I understand your question correctly, at Statistics Canada we protect the confidentiality of the information we obtain, so we're not in a position to point to an individual company and say, “You're price gouging.” If I take a look at the data that we have available that indicates where prices or margins are increasing, again, I'd point to the retail service price index and wholesale service price index as sources of that information.

Finance committee  I'll turn to Ms. Ertl.

Finance committee  That's correct.