Canada: your mortgage is inside this index
Canada's CPI does something most of its peers avoid: it includes mortgage interest cost directly, on a user-cost approach, at a weight of about 3.46% inside a shelter component that is 28.34% of the basket.
The effect is not academic. When the Bank of Canada raises rates to slow inflation, mortgage interest cost rises, and it enters the very index the Bank is trying to bring down. That component rose 20.1% in 2024 before slowing to 5.3% in 2025. So a Canadian conversion spanning a tightening cycle carries the cost of borrowing inside it, which is worth knowing if you are comparing this page against an American figure, where mortgage interest is excluded in favour of owners' equivalent rent.
If you want the version without that effect, the Bank's preferred core measures are CPI-trim, which removes the top and bottom 20% of price changes by weight, and CPI-median, the change at the middle of the weight distribution.
The currency has never broken, which is unusual here
Canada has kept dollars and cents continuously since the Province of Canada's currency legislation of 1857 and the Uniform Currency Act of 1871, both comfortably before this series starts in 1914. There is no decimalisation to allow for, as there is for Australia and New Zealand, and no redenomination, as there is for France or Finland.
That makes Canada one of the straightforward countries on this site: a dollar amount from any year in the series is already in today's unit, and only the price level has changed. Before 1914 the picture thins out quickly. The Department of Labour published retail prices from 1910, and a 1915 board of inquiry reconstructed annual values back to 1900, but none of that is chained into the series used here.
1981 was the modern peak, not the record
Canadian inflation averaged 12.50% in 1981, peaking at 12.90% year-on-year that July, with the Bank Rate reaching 21.03% in August. Contrast the recent episode: 8.13% in June 2022.
Neither is the record. That belongs to June 1920, at 21.65%. One recent quirk worth noting if you are converting across 2025: the consumer carbon price was removed on 1 April that year, and headline inflation fell to 1.74% by April, with gasoline down 18.1%.