Every number in The Island Trade Report comes from a source you can check yourself. This page says where each one comes from, and what it does and does not mean.
Where the numbers come from
- Housing starts – Statistics Canada Web Data Service, collected by CMHC. Victoria comes from CMHC’s own monthly workbook, which StatCan does not publish at that geography.
- Building permits – the issuing municipality’s own monthly report. Campbell River publishes permit by permit; other Island towns publish less often or not in a machine-readable form, and we say so rather than estimate.
- Resale figures – VIREB / CREA monthly statistics. We extract figures only and write our own words around them.
- Lumber, copper, diesel – Statistics Canada. Lumber and copper are price indexes, not dollar prices. Diesel is a real cents-per-litre price for Victoria, the only Island city published.
- Bank of Canada rate – the Bank’s own Valet API.
- Our audit numbers – our own audits of Vancouver Island trade businesses. Every figure carries how many businesses it is based on.
The rules we hold ourselves to
- Any slice based on fewer than ten businesses is not published as a percentage.
- We report and explain. We never forecast.
- A month with no figure says so. We do not fill gaps with estimates.
- Monthly and quarterly figures are never compared with each other.
- We publish good news too.