Of course, inflation risk is something we can never take lightly. However, I would just add a couple of things to your premise. One is that most of the anecdotal evidence we have around higher prices is coming from commodity markets. Commodity prices, in fact, have been quite depressed for the last while. In fact, if we look at the CRB index of global commodity prices, they're just now returning to the levels they were at back in 2014.
If you look at the Bank of Canada website, you'll see the commodity price index. There, too, with all the basket of commodities relevant to Canada, prices have been low and now are returning. This is not inflation. This is normalization of prices.
I know there are some exceptions and some prices have gone up a lot, such as lumber. It's a good example. There are also still the laws of demand and supply. They still work. Last year, there were plenty of cutbacks in production because the consensus among a lot of economists was that the economy would be very slow for a very long time. As I mentioned in my introductory remarks, the economy has bounced back far exceeding all of those expectations because economists had modelled it in the traditional way that recessions normally work. This one isn't like that at all.
I think some sectors are still catching up to the recovery in demand. Inflation almost never comes from commodity prices because with commodities you can find more product. You can expand capacity in time, so usually when prices go up enough, somebody brings more capacity online and that causes that price to settle back down again.
I agree with what I've heard from various central banks, including our own, that the inflation we're observing right now is very likely to be transitory.