Canada inflation accelerates to 2.4% in March as gasoline surge lifts headline rate

Canada’s annual inflation rate accelerated to 2.4% in March from 1.8% in February, Statistics Canada said Monday, as a sharp run-up in gasoline and other energy costs pushed headline price growth higher ahead of the Bank of Canada’s next interest-rate decision.

Statistics Canada said “driving faster price growth in headline inflation were higher prices for energy, especially gasoline, due to the conflict in the Middle East.” Gasoline prices rose 5.9% from a year earlier and surged 21.2% from February to March, the agency said. “Prices surged 21.2% on a monthly basis, the largest price increase for gasoline on record, due to the supply shock resulting from the conflict in the Middle East,” Statistics Canada said.

Overall consumer prices rose 0.5% in March on a seasonally adjusted monthly basis and 0.9% on a non-seasonally adjusted basis. Beyond energy, food purchased from stores rose 4.4% from a year earlier, transportation increased 3.7%, and shelter was up 1.7%.

The details suggested the March jump was more concentrated than broad-based. Excluding gasoline, the consumer price index rose 2.2% from a year earlier in March, down from 2.4% in February. Statistics Canada’s March readings for the Bank of Canada’s preferred core measures of underlying inflation were also clustered in the low-2% range: CPI-common was 2.6%, CPI-median was 2.3%, and CPI-trim was 2.2%.

Energy prices overall rose 3.9% from a year earlier in March after falling 9.3% in February, underscoring how much of the headline acceleration came from that category. Statistics Canada said prices increased at a faster pace in every province in March than in February. In Quebec, for example, annual inflation edged up to 2.9% in March from 2.8% the month before.

The report is the latest major inflation reading before the Bank of Canada’s scheduled April 29 rate announcement. The central bank held its policy rate at 2.25% on March 18 and at the time warned that higher energy costs would feed into headline inflation. “The sharp increase in global energy prices has led to increases in gasoline prices, and this will push up total inflation in the coming months,” the Bank of Canada said then.

One reason economists and policymakers will look past the headline number alone is that early-2026 year-over-year comparisons have been affected by the temporary GST/HST break that ran from Dec. 14, 2024, to Feb. 15, 2025. Statistics Canada said March is the final month influenced by that base-year effect, making the latest report an important but somewhat unusual snapshot of inflation.