Yes, sir, you're quite right. There has been a shift in overall non-mortgage borrowing toward credit cards.
As I noted in my opening remarks, outstanding credit card debt, even just on the chartered banks' cards, has grown by about a third since the Bank of Canada started increasing interest rates in early 2022. That's much faster than mortgage debt itself. Obviously, with mortgage debt becoming so expensive, the number of new mortgages issued has slowed down, so mortgage debt is not growing rapidly, but hard-pressed households are clearly relying more on credit cards to finance their purchases.
Now, which purchases are using the credit cards and which are still paid in cash? Ultimately, that doesn't matter. I'm sure that some of the credit companies, like Equifax and so on, can break down where the actual credit is being used—if it's at the grocery store, the appliance store or for entertainment purposes and restaurants. Ultimately, that doesn't matter, because money is fungible. The fact that they're going into credit card debt at an increasing rate is the key problem. The interest burden on that credit card debt, as you correctly point out, is much higher than for other forms of debt.
I do think that these trends over the last three years certainly reinforce the necessity of your committee's inquiry to consider the full range of regulatory options, including setting maximums on the interest that can be charged, as I suggested, and also more transparency and regulation on the fees that are built into those interest costs.