Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the members of the committee. On behalf of the over 12,000 members of Mortgage Professionals Canada, thank you for providing us with the opportunity to take part in the discussions today.
I am Paul Taylor, president and CEO of Mortgage Professionals Canada, and as Mr. Easter has just stated, with me is Elaine Taylor—no relation—vice-president of sales at MCAP Financial Corporation, but also currently serving as chair of Mortgage Professionals Canada's board.
For an initial context for our remarks today, I'd like to remind the committee of MPC's membership composition. We are a professional association promoting mortgage broker-originated mortgages. By head count, mortgage brokers and agents across Canada make up the largest component of our membership. However, almost all Canadian banks and mortgage lenders that originate mortgages through independent agents and brokers also belong to our association. Additionally, all three mortgage insurers in Canada are also members. Because of the diverse nature of our members' businesses and their respective role in fulfilling broker-originated mortgages, MPC has a thorough understanding of the marketplace impact of any changes to mortgage finance and funding costs, securitization and liquidity, underwriting criteria and lending guidelines, and changing consumer behaviours.
With the context and the stated framework of the discussion today being the impact of COVID-19 on housing and homelessness, we will probably comment primarily on measures implemented to ensure continued liquidity in the marketplace and on the individual income continuation programs, and business continuity and wage subsidy programs created over the course of the last four to six weeks, both of which we consider critical to ensuring the continued security of housing for millions of Canadians.
Real estate purchase and sale transactions have diminished dramatically in some regions of the country. Home purchases and sale transactions are usually about a one-to-eight week process and at the beginning of the calls for social distancing and isolation as a best practice, our industry wrestled with changes in process to complete the transactions that were under way.
At the time, home inspectors couldn't gain access to properties to estimate values and many legal professions were unable to permit electronic signing for title registry changes, both traditionally necessary functions for mortgage funding to be completed.
Fortunately, most of those challenges were dealt with in a collaborative fashion, with lenders, mortgage insurers, realtors and mortgage brokers all working towards the best outcome compromises to ensure no one was stuck between the sale of their previous home and obtaining legal possession of their next, but we are now experiencing a significant reduction of new business activity, like many industry segments in Canada. This is placing significant financial strain on businesses and on individual Canadians' ability to meet their financial obligations. Once the transactions in the current business pipeline are finalized, we anticipate many of our members will have little opportunity to generate income, both through the remainder of the lockdown and for a period of time following the acceptable resumption of business.
I'd now like to pass the mike to Elaine.