Annual inflation rate rises to 2.2% for its fastest pace since fall 2014
OTTAWA — The country’s annual pace of inflation sped up to 2.2 per cent last month, its fastest pace in more than three years as the rate moved above the central bank’s ideal bull’s-eye of two per cent, Statistics Canada said Friday.
The agency’s February data represented a significant boost to the inflation rate compared with the month before when it was 1.7 per cent.
The report also found the average of the agency’s three measures of core inflation, designed to omit the noise of more-volatile items like gasoline, continued its upward momentum last month and has now climbed slightly above two per cent for the first time since February 2012.
Inflation is a central piece of the information for the Bank of Canada’s interest-rate decisions and the stronger numbers translate into a hike sooner than experts have anticipated.