The price of some staple food items in Canada may be going up faster, and more significantly than reflected by Statistics Canada.

The senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, Sylvain Charlebois, says the price-tracking company BetterCart looked at a number of items and compared their findings with those in Statistics Canada’s Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Ketchup, rather than being 5.9 per cent cheaper since January, is actually 7.3 per cent more expensive. And French fries, 26.2-per cent more expensive, not 5.9-per cent. Macaroni, meanwhile, is up 12.7 per cent, versus being reported as down 3.1 per cent by Stats Canada.

“We haven’t looked intro produce or meat yet but we are expecting some differences there as well,” Charlebois says.

“The CPI report does matter a lot. It impacts our lives. Often the CPI report is used to negotiate collective agreements. It is used to negotiate salaries, rents, a lot of things that impacts our lives and the cost of living in Canada.”

He says while Statistics Canada has very good data, it might not be reflecting the daily volatility in prices.

“So if an agreement is settled at say 1.5 or 2 per cent and the inflation rate is misread, then of course people are stuck with a salary. And that’s really what the problem is right now. A lot of wages are not moving up as high as inflation.”

BetterCart scans fliers, the web and other sources daily, whereas government data is submitted in large part by grocers themselves.

According to the most recent CPI update from Stats Canada last month, inflation reached 4.1 per cent in August.