Finance committee  I don't know exactly what we've recommended, but certainly those policies have gone both ways over time.

Finance committee  Sure.

Finance committee  Thank you for the opportunity to clarify what I said. I did not, in fact, say that this was something the government should do. I said it was a policy that we should evaluate for the future. It's not a current concern. As we look at a range of different alternatives for the mar

Finance committee  Thank you.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Derek. Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, and thank you all for the opportunity to be here today. Let me begin by reiterating CMHC's commitment to the aim of special examinations required by the Financial Administration Act. These audits provide the

Public Accounts committee  Let's just distinguish between the two types of stress testing of course.

Public Accounts committee  Stress testing of our capital is something that we do with a range of scenarios of economic downturns. For example, we would model the U.S. financial crisis as if it were to happen here. We do that as part of our annual work and that's what we publish. Somewhat confusingly the s

Public Accounts committee  The second category doesn't pertain to our business. The first does. We witnessed in 2017 and throughout 2018 declines in our volumes of insured activities of 15% to 20%. I should tell the member that was roughly as expected. We estimated it could be 20% to 25% but we thought beh

Public Accounts committee  Not—

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we have.

Public Accounts committee  You'll be gratified by the answer. First of all, we do use machines to manage workflow in our homeowner transactional business. It's a piece of software called emili, which we're updating. It's effectively a rules engine that something is either automatically approved—an insured

Public Accounts committee  The change in 2018 from 220% to 165% was as a result of a change in methodology at OSFI. It's as if accounting rules changed and we had to restate. It's a comparison of apples to oranges and it would be inaccurate to suggest that we decreased our capital. As a result, it's just a

Public Accounts committee  We had a lot of excess capital, and it's an effective discipline on management that management would operate with finite resources. Defining just how much excess capital we have is a problem at the margin when we're a little unsure as to what our capital should be or when the Off

Public Accounts committee  In hindsight, it would mean that our premiums were set too high for the economic cycle that in fact occurred, but we set our premiums to adjust for an economic cycle that could be good or bad. We've had strong economic growth that's persisted and no downturn. As a result, looking

Public Accounts committee  Yes.