How the index is calculated

Population

The NMDI is computed from ten provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Yukon and the Northwest Territories are collected from the same NRCan survey and displayed on the fuel page. They are excluded from the national index because they carry negligible national freight volume and equal-weighting them distorts the figure. Territorial diesel is supplied off Edmonton and typically lands near Alberta's price, below the national mean, so the exclusion is the more conservative choice.

Method

Each provincial figure is the unweighted arithmetic mean of NRCan survey city prices within that province. The number of survey cities varies by province. The national index is the unweighted mean of the ten provincial figures. It is not population-weighted or freight-weighted; every province counts equally.

An unweighted mean of provincial means is simpler to verify and harder to manipulate than a weighting scheme, and it changes only when diesel prices change, not when a weighting assumption changes.

North American Diesel Index

The North American Diesel Index (NADI) combines the Canadian NMDI with the United States national on-highway diesel average. It is the simple arithmetic mean of the two — each country counts once, and the index is not consumption-weighted or freight-weighted.

The US figure is the U.S. Energy Information Administration weekly retail diesel survey (ultra-low sulfur, on-highway), published in US dollars per gallon. It is converted to Canadian cents per litre at the latest Bank of Canada USD/CAD rate, using 1 US gallon = 3.785411784 litres.

Equal-country weighting is the deliberate choice: it treats Canada and the United States as two markets rather than scaling by population or consumption, so the index does not collapse into a US price with a Canadian footnote. Canada is higher than the United States in every print since the index began, driven by carbon pricing and provincial fuel taxes.

Source

Natural Resources Canada weekly diesel survey, RSS productID=5, collected by Kalibrate Technologies under contract to NRCan. All figures are inclusive of federal and provincial fuel taxes, carbon taxes, and sales taxes. The federal excise on diesel, normally 4 cents per litre, is suspended nationwide from 20 April to 7 September 2026 per Finance Canada and CBSA Customs Notice 26-11.

This dashboard contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. Diesel prices originate with Natural Resources Canada.

Cadence

NRCan surveys weekly. The dashboard rebuilds every 30 minutes from the most recent survey, so the diesel figure holds steady between prints and deltas step once a week. The exchange rate reflects the most recent Bank of Canada observation, which is business-daily. Border wait times come from the live CBSA feed, polled every 30 minutes; the timestamp shown is CBSA's capture time for that crossing, not our fetch time, so it reflects how current CBSA's own data is.

Revision history

2026-08-15 — Historical backfill. Weekly diesel prints from 2016 through the first live-collection date were reconstructed from Natural Resources Canada's annual city price tables, using the identical ten-province roll-up applied to live data. Prints from the first live-collection date onward come from live weekly collection. Both paths use the same NRCan source and the same method. Where NRCan revised a price after its first print, the reconstructed (revised) value is shown. For the 2026-08-11 print the provincial figures were revised by 0.1–0.9¢/L; the national index was unchanged at 222.2¢/L.

2026-08-12 — Correction. The USD/CAD exchange rate published on this dashboard was incorrect from 2026-07-13, the site's first public deploy, through 2026-08-12. The Bank of Canada API returns observations newest first; the collector read them as oldest first and published the oldest observation as the current rate, with the day-over-day change inverted. At the time the error was found the dashboard displayed 1.4206, an observation dated 2026-06-29, when the correct current observation was 1.3927 dated 2026-08-11. The error affected the exchange rate module only. Diesel prices, the NMDI, and all provincial figures come from a separate source and were not affected. The collector now sorts observations by date, publishes the observation date alongside the rate, and fails loudly rather than falling back to a default when the fetch fails.

2026-08-05 — Index moved from a 12-unit basis (including YT and NT) to a 10-unit basis (excluding territories). The national figure shifted from 224.8 to 228.3¢/L as a function of this methodology change. Values before this date are not directly comparable with later ones.

2026-07-28 — Initial publication. 12-unit basis, unweighted mean of provincial means.

Corrections policy

Errors in the underlying NRCan data are corrected when NRCan publishes a revision. Errors in computation are corrected immediately and logged above. A corrected figure is never retroactively substituted; the new value appears with the correction date and both values are recorded.

Questions: northernmilemedia@gmail.com