Saskatchewan consumers started 2025 with a bang.
Policymakers have been tracking retail or consumer spending patterns quite closely for the past few months. Once Donald Trump began talking about imposing tariffs, there were concerns that consumers might pullback, preferring to sit on any cash they might be holding.
And we now have some numbers to provide some guidance on how they’re acting. Nationally, Canadians did indeed pull back in January. But the decline was in Ontario and Quebec as overall retail spending dropped a little more than half a point even with some inflationary pressures pushing prices higher on some items.
But here in Saskatchewan, we were marching to a different beat. Sales in this province rose 2.7-percent in January. That led the country in growth, largely because we boosted spending on vehicles and parts. And that meant revenues for retailers grew by nearly 9-percent over the past year – well beyond the rate of inflation as consumer confidence appears to be quite solid in this region.
