Economy report: standing method

This page holds the parts of the Economy report's method that stay the same from issue to issue. Each issue has its own dated page with that month's datasets, figures and sources; the issue page wins wherever the two differ.

This season the report asks one question: can Canada capture the value from what it grows and digs? Every issue takes one dataset, one correlation and one implication for the reader, and lands just before a decision the reader is making.

The Canadian Grain Commission (CGC) is the federal regulator that records every tonne of grain leaving the country. We use its monthly file of exports by destination from licensed facilities, which also reports container exports. We use the monthly destination file rather than the weekly export table, because the weekly table reports exports by port of clearance, not by destination. Destination is as declared at loading, not the final buyer.

Statistics Canada's Canadian International Merchandise Trade (CIMT) records customs exports by Harmonized System (HS) code, the international product classification, and by country. We use it to check the CGC record in value terms and to cover products the CGC file does not, such as canola oil and canola meal.

For Corridor Watch we read each partner's own import records from Canada through UN Comtrade, in United States dollars and net weight as the partner reports them. These are customs values before duty, and a six-digit HS code can include more than the product we name, which we say where it matters.

Each tariff event is dated from published reporting of its notice and checked by web search. Each issue page says whether the notice itself has been read or only reported, and we do not call a notice read until it has been.

The core measure is the percentage-point change in a market's share of a commodity across a tariff event, comparing the months before with the months after. Shares are of tonnes for the CGC record and of Canadian dollar value for customs records. Monthly shares move with vessel timing, so headline comparisons use windows of several months, and a single month is used only where the issue says why.

Intervals are 95 percent percentile intervals from 2,000 bootstrap resamples of months within each period, with a fixed seed so the published file reproduces them exactly. With six to twelve months a side they are wide by design.

Corridor Watch follows one export market per issue: the market's own import records, the trade rules it applies to Canadian goods and what that means for the next shipping window. The October 2026 issue covered India.

Each issue makes dated, public claims with a confidence and a resolution date. They go into the predictions ledger when the issue is published, and a later issue grades each one when it comes due.

CGC data is used under the Open Government Licence Canada, CIMT under the Statistics Canada Open Licence, and UN Comtrade under its own terms of use.