Katrin Ray Shumakov via Getty Images In this stock photo, an aerial view of houses and apartments in Toronto can be seen through a tilt-shift "miniaturization" effect.

MONTREAL ― Remember when house prices soared in Toronto, Vancouver and other places a few years back, causing homeowners to celebrate and prospective buyers to despair? Seems like a hard thing to miss if you’ve been in Canada in recent years, but somehow, the great housing boom that prompted foreign buyers’ taxes and mortgage stress tests doesn’t appear in Statistics Canada’s records. Its New Housing Price Index, published monthly, is “next to irrelevant” and “seems to have slept right through the home price boom of 2016-17,” Bank of Montreal chief economist Doug Porter declared in a client note Thursday. Watch: These are celebrities who’ve snapped up Canadian real estate. Story continues below.

Porter published a chart comparing the Statistics Canada measure to the MLS home price index published by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). While CREA’s measure shows a distinct spike in price growth during the frenzy several years ago, StatCan’s index shows only a slight bump ― and no growth at all over the past year.

BMO Economics This chart from BMO Economics shows a large spike in the housing market when measured using the MLS home price index, while Statistics Canada shows only a small bump in costs.

“While average prices were zooming nationally by almost 20 per cent at the height of the boom, the new home price index was suggesting everything was normal and calm, with increases peaking at below 4 per cent,” Porter wrote. “Seriously??” For its part, StatCan is defending its house price index, noting that their index and the CREA numbers aren’t measuring the same thing. StatCan’s index is an estimate of the “user costs” of owning a newly-built home, while CREA’s numbers are for the selling prices of existing homes on the Multiple Listing Service. And the StatCan index excludes condos, which the agency measures separately.