By: Myke Thomas The B-20 mortgage qualifying stress test will be tweaked as of April 6 and, not surprisingly, the bureaucracy is strong in this one. As it stands now, the stress test requires all borrowers to qualify for mortgages based on the greater of the five-year benchmark rate published by the Bank of Canada or the contractual mortgage rate from … Read More

New rules will be in force as of April By: Peter Evans Starting in April, the government will change the rules that cover mortgage lending in a way that should, in the short term at least, make it easier to qualify for a loan to buy a home. The Department of Finance says that as of April 6, the so-called … Read More

Monday Morning Interest Rate Update for February 10, 2020 by David Larock Last week TD Bank lowered its posted five-year fixed rate from 5.34% to 4.99%. You might be wondering why this is worth writing about because the Big Six banks don’t actually lend at their posted rates. Instead, those rates have primarily been used to significantly inflate the size of … Read More

by Ephraim Vecina Amid the considerable market impact of the B-20 regulations, multiple observers and industry organizations have called for revisions of the mortgage qualification stress testing, but the chief of the Bank of Nova Scotia has argued that such changes would not address the root of the nation’s housing crisis. Scotiabank president and CEO Brian Porter recently said that what policies should … Read More

by David Larock The Bank of Canada (BoC) left its policy rate unchanged last week, as widely expected, and that means variable mortgage rates will remain at their current levels for the time being. The Bank also issued its latest Monetary Policy Report (MPR), which provides us with its quarterly assessment of economic conditions both at home and abroad. The January MPR, … Read More