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“Some accuse the bank of ignoring the recent run-up in inflation, but it needs to focus on where inflation is going to be 18-24 months down the road, because monetary policy takes time to have an effect on the real economy,” said Leslie Preston, at TD Economics.

In its quarterly Monetary Policy Report, issued on Wednesday, the bank maintained that recent prices increases would prove temporary.

“It forecasts that inflationary momentum is expected to ebb next year,” Ms. Preston said.

In its MPR, the bank forecast said inflation would track at 2.1% between April and June. However, with the June CPI report, the second-quarter reading now works out 2.2% — the biggest increase since the first quarter of 2012.

“Wages remain so muted that it’s unlikely that this mini-burst in prices is going to be sustained for long,” said Douglas Porter, chief economist at BMO Capital Markets.

There might be “a ratcheting up of energy prices due to geopolitical [concerns], but barring that, I suspect a lot of this run-up that we’re seeing in other goods is a bit of a reaction, or response, to the extremely low readings we saw in 2013,” he said.

“It’s almost like the pressure valve has been opened up a bit to let off some of the pressures that built up in the last year.”

The bank’s inflation target is 2%, the midday point of policymakers’ 1%-to-3% comfort range. Their main tool for keeping inflation on target is the central bank’s benchmark lending rate, which has been at a near-record low of 1% since September 2010 — a level meant to stimulate economic growth after the recession. Most economists don’t expect the Bank of Canada to alter that rate until mid-2015, at the earliest.