I think that anybody who has been paying attention to real estate transactions will see that there's been a pretty significant fall-off in that since the beginning of the year when the uninsured stress test was introduced. We're quite concerned that it really does disproportionately affect first-time buyers and younger Canadians. From the perspective of the long-term economic health of the country, if we're not enabling folks to start building equity early on, then a decade from now, the average balance sheet of a Canadian is going to be a whole lot worse. That's not really going to be a great news story for us.
It's really incumbent upon the government to take a look at the fact that interest rates have risen as well since the time that this stress test was introduced, which organically will push some people out of the marketplace. We're almost doubling down on the impact of some of these increases. I understand that there is concern about debt-to-income ratios and things, but I think it's also really important to make a clear distinction between debt that's used with an asset to secure it versus things that are not secured and therefore much more discretionary.
There's also no crisis, really. OREA's rates on mortgages were at 23 or 24 basis points. In really clear numbers, 23 or 24 out of 10,000 homeowners were behind on their mortgage payments. I feel like we've put protections in place to make sure that we have a stable financial system, which is, of course, a laudable goal, but we seem to have lost sight of the overall health of the middle-class Canadian who we're trying to support longer term.