5. City-based consumer price indexes

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Historical consumer price indexes (CPIs) are not available by province. However, they are available for major cities. This leaves two options for creating historical CPI estimates. One is to link the current vintage provincial CPI to historical estimates of city-specific CPIs. The second is to link city CPIs through time, and apply them to provincial income estimates to produce real income series. The latter method was chosen because it yields more consistency in the price series over time, which facilitates examinations beyond those in Brown and Macdonald (2015). It also results in a more consistent measurement error over time, which provides more stability in the direction of biases.

Table 1
City consumer price indexes, sample spans for measured data and instruments
Table summary
This table displays the results of City consumer price indexes. The information is grouped by City (appearing as row headers), Province, Measured sample span and Instruments (appearing as column headers).

City	Province	Measured sample span	Instruments
St. John’s	Newfoundland and Labrador	1952 to present	Average of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Saint John, New Brunswick, for 1949 to 1951
Charlottetown and Summerside	Prince Edward Island	1974 to present	Saint John for 1926 to 1973
Halifax	Nova Scotia	1926 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Saint John	New Brunswick	1926 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Montréal	Quebec	1926 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Toronto	Ontario	1926 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Winnipeg	Manitoba	1926 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Regina	Saskatchewan	1926 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Calgary	Alberta	1926 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Vancouver	British Columbia	1926 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Whitehorse	Yukon	1983 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Yellowknife	Northwest Territories	1983 to present	Note ...: not applicable
Iqaluit	Nunavut	2003 to present	Note ...: not applicable
... not applicable Source: Statistics Canada.

Price indexes for a major city from each province from three sources are linked. These indexes provide long-term measures of price growth. For 1971 to 2011, the data are from CANSIM table 326-0021. For 1940 to 1970, city-CPI estimates are from Series K23 of the Historical Statistics of Canada. For 1926 to 1939, the data source is Emery and Levitt (2002). These sources do not provide as much breadth through time as income or population estimates (Table 1). Data for St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, begin in 1952. An average of price movements from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Saint John, New Brunswick, are used to back-cast St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, for 1949 to 1952. Estimates for Charlottetown and Summerside, Prince Edward Island, begin in 1974. To produce historical estimates, the series for Saint John, New Brunswick, is used to back-cast the historical series.

The use of cities in neighbouring provinces when data are missing provides a balanced panel dataset. This facilitates internal instrumental variable estimation, but it also introduces measurement error. The trade-off between including or omitting these data points depends on the use of the data and the methods chosen for estimation.