Olga Bilyk is a Senior Economist in the Canadian Economic Analysis Department. She received her Master of Arts in Economics from the University of Western Ontario.
Canada and the United States have both benefited from decades of free trade. But US tariffs significantly changed this relationship, and Canadians reacted. In our research, we explore the Buy Canadian sentiment one year after it emerged and measure how much it has shifted travel patterns and spending in grocery stores.
Inflation in grocery prices picked up in 2025, largely due to rising cost pressures that emerged in late 2024 and worked their way through supply chains. Compared with the cost pressures experienced during the COVID‑19 pandemic, these have been more limited, narrower in scope and more commonly tied to imported items.
Using the microdata underlying the Canadian consumer price index, we study how often and by how much firms changed their prices during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that the surge in inflation was mainly associated with retailers raising prices much more often than before. We also find that more recently, corporate price-setting behaviour appears to be approaching pre-pandemic norms.
We find that prices and costs for consumer-oriented firms moved roughly one-for-one during the COVID-19 pandemic. This means firms fully passed rising costs through to the prices they charged. However, our results are suggestive, given data limitations and the uncertainty associated with estimating markups.
We study the relationship between characteristics of new mortgages and borrowers’ financial stress in Canada’s energy-intensive regions following the 2014 collapse in oil prices. We find that borrowers with limited home equity were more likely to have difficulty repaying debt.
Exceptional strength in the housing market during the pandemic is underpinning Canada’s economic recovery. However, two key vulnerabilities—housing market imbalances and elevated household indebtedness—have intensified.
This report examines detailed data on home mortgages to provide a better understanding of the vulnerabilities associated with the mortgage market. The proportion of low-ratio mortgages is growing, particularly in regions with strong house price growth. Moreover, these borrowers exhibit less flexibility to adverse shocks, since they have high debt levels relative to income and have taken mortgages with long amortization periods.
