Imagine you have a basket.
Imagine it's a special kind of basket.
Tt holds the things you'd normally expect when you go shopping and some other things you wouldn't.
Okay so it seems a bit strange but it's actually quite important because what's in this basket are the hundreds of goods and services that Canadians typically spend money on.
Statistics Canada adds them all together to create a measure of average prices that it calls the Consumer Price Index or CPI.
This allows us to measure how fast consumer prices rise over time, something we call inflation.
The Canadian economy works best when inflation is low and stable.
That's how things are today, and it's easy to take that kind of stability for granted but back in the 1970s and 80s it wasn't like that at all.
The 70's started out okay with the baskets contents showing an annual rate of inflation around 3% but over the next 10 years it was a different story.
By 1980 inflation had skyrocketed to 10%.
And you thought that hairstyles were painful.
That meant that the CPI basket was getting way more expensive each year.
If it cost $100 in 1970 then by 1980 its cost of more than doubled.
Year after year price after price kept going up up.
By the 1980s it was clear high inflation was a real problem.
So central bank's spent a lot of time trying to bring it down.
They also worked hard to figure out how to keep it that way because even though it was lower than the 1970s it was still too high and unpredictable.
Then in 1991 the Bank of Canada introduced inflation targeting.
The goal was to reduce inflation and keep it low and stable so prices would rise more slowly.
by 1993 that goal was firmly established as a 2% inflation target. 
Since then inflation targeting has done its job.
At our current rate of inflation it would take 35 years for the price to double.
Low and stable inflation allows Canadians to plan, save and spend with more confidence.
The result has been more stable prices and a more stable economy too.