Retail sales suffer steepest monthly fall in 11 years

Canadian retail sales registered their steepest monthly drop in 11 years in November, dropping 2.4 per cent to $34.9-billion on a seasonally adjusted basis, Statistics Canada said yesterday. The decline was worse than the 2-per-cent drop expected by forecasters, and even though it stemmed mostly from lower gasoline prices and unit sales of new cars, economists said it looks as if consumers are now sitting firmly on their wallets. Excluding the automotive sector retail sales were flat. "I don't think it's as bad as the headline would suggest [because] this was largely a gasoline story," Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns, said in a telephone interview. "But even so this is a real turnaround from what we've seen in the last few years, where Canadian consumers could be counted on as a very steady source of support for the economy."