By Promit Mukherjee<\/p>\n
OTTAWA, April 20 (Reuters) – Canada’s annual inflation rate rose 2.4% in March, with prices jumping 0.9% on the month, as higher crude oil costs \u200cdrove up gasoline prices, data showed on Monday.<\/p>\n
The headline annual inflation rate was last \u200cseen at this level in December. The monthly inflation spike was the highest in 14 months, Statistics Canada said.<\/p>\n
The \u200bIran war, which started in the end of February, has choked crude oil shipments from the Strait of Hormuz, wiping off almost a fifth of global oil supply. This has led to a spike in gasoline prices at the pump and strained consumer budgets.<\/p>\n
Analysts polled by Reuters had \u200cforecast a slightly higher consumer \u2060price index with annual inflation estimate at 2.6% from 1.8% in the prior month, and monthly inflation at 1.1%, up from 0.5% in February.<\/p>\n
Canada’s \u2060inflation has been benign for well over a year and have stayed around the mid-point of the Bank of Canada’s target range of 1-3%.<\/p>\n
BoC Governor Tiff Macklem said last week that it was \u200bnot concerned \u200babout a short-term spike in inflation expectations.<\/p>\n
The war \u200bpushed gasoline prices up by 5.9% \u200con a yearly basis and 21.2% surge on a monthly basis in March. The year-over-year figure was partly muted due to higher gasoline price during the same period last year due to a carbon levy which was dropped in April 2025.<\/p>\n
The higher gasoline prices increased the cost of transportation, which is the second biggest contributor to the CPI basket, by 3.7% in \u200cMarch from a year ago.<\/p>\n
Food prices were also another \u200bmajor contributor to the increase in headline annual inflation, \u200bdata from the statistics agency said.<\/p>\n
Prices for \u200bfood purchased from stores rose 4.4% annually in March, after increasing 4.1% \u200cin February. Prices for fresh vegetables increased \u200b7.8%, the largest increase \u200bsince August 2023, StatsCan said.<\/p>\n
Since headline inflation could be volatile, the BoC and economists also monitor core inflation metrics to gauge the underlying trend of inflation.<\/p>\n
Its closely-tracked measures \u200bthe CPI-median, the centermost component \u200cof the CPI basket, stayed unchanged from the prior month at 2.3%, while \u200bCPI-trim, which excludes the most extreme price changes, edged down to 2.2% in \u200bMarch.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Promit Mukherjee; Editing by Dale Smith)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Promit Mukherjee OTTAWA, April 20 (Reuters) – Canada’s annual inflation rate rose 2.4% in March, with prices…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,6216,6213,6214,6215,1672],"class_list":{"0":"post-11512","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-canada","9":"tag-gasoline-price","10":"tag-gasoline-prices","11":"tag-headline-inflation","12":"tag-inflation-expectations","13":"tag-statistics-canada"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}