Canada's annual inflation rate slowed to 2.9 per cent in January, mostly due to a deceleration in the price of gas, Statistics Canada said Tuesday.
Economists were expecting the rate to come in at 3.3 per cent.
Gas prices fell four per cent year over year in January after driving headline inflation up to 3.4 per cent in December, due to what economists call a base-year effect (the impact of comparing prices in a given month to the same month a year earlier).