7 For example, before the COVID-19 pandemic, results of the Bank of Canada’s Business  Outlook Survey often showed that a relatively small share of firms planned to increase their prices in the short term, while at the same time, a relatively large share of firms expected their costs to rise. This pattern is consistent with low pass-through of costs to prices.
However, this pattern was broken in 2021 and 2022 when, in multiple quarters, the share of firms expecting to increase their prices was equal to or larger than the share expecting increases in costs. For details, see “Chart 9: Businesses expect growth in their input and output prices to slow,” Business Outlook Survey— Fourth Quarter of 2022 (January 2023).