Canada's inflation rate slowed down to 1.2 per cent in November largely because food prices keep getting cheaper.

Statistics Canada reported Thursday that the consumer price index cooled a little from the previous month largely because food prices declined in November by 0.7 per cent on a year-over-year basis, matching the previous month's decline.

Economists had been expecting the November inflation rate to come in at around 1.4 per cent.

Fresh vegetables and fruit as well as meat dropped in price in November, while prices rose in the fish, seafood and other marine products index.

One of the other biggest contributors to the slowdown was cheaper gasoline, as gas prices were 1.7 per cent lower, on average, in November than they were in the same month a year earlier. That wasn't the case in October, when gas prices rose by 2.5 per cent on an annualized basis.

"Lower gasoline prices are a nice development, but will not last given the general march upward in energy prices over the past year," TD Bank economist James Marple said of the numbers. "Still, while headline inflation will move up on higher energy prices, it is not likely to get much above the two per cent" that the Bank of Canada likes to see in setting its interest rate policy.

New data

The numbers were also interesting in that they are the first month under the data agency's new ways of calculating inflation.

From here on in, Statistics Canada will release three new inflation metrics — CPI-common, CPI-median and CPI-trim — which all calculate the inflation rate in a slightly different way. The goal of the move announced in November is to give the Bank of Canada a more complete picture of the actual cost of living so it can set its monetary policy accordingly.

In November, the three numbers came in at 1.3, 1.9 and 1.6 per cent, respectively — each lower than what they would have been the month before.

The logical conclusion of that, Marple says, is "no matter how you slice it or what measure you use, inflation in Canada is cooling."