Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  I haven't looked at it, other than to say that when we look at where the economy is going and try to think about what's going to come in terms of insolvency filings.... I think The Globe and Mail reported in June that the household saving rate in Canada actually increased quite s

Finance committee  I don't know if I could speak to seeing a trend in that regard. From talking to the LIT community, I think one trend that I would note in the past few years is an increase in informal workouts, in creditors working with debtors and finding a solution. They don't necessarily nee

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  That was a report that was done after my departure from the OSB. I left for about three years. Since my return, we've taken a close look at what we're calling the debt advisory marketplace. As I've mentioned, there are credit counsellors in Canada who are excellent. They are we

Finance committee  First, again, I have to apologize for our data on this. It's not perfect. The way we would look at payday loans is based on the name of the creditor as entered by the licensed insolvency trustee. Of course, a multitude of organizations would fall into that large basket of sort of

Finance committee  I think that's a fair assumption. I wouldn't say I have empirical data to support that.

Finance committee  Most of the requirements in insolvency are set out in the legislation or regulations. As I mentioned, I do have directive-making power. We can provide some flexibilities on some requirements. We would do that fairly carefully. We are sort of leaning toward areas where we can actu

Finance committee  No, I'm sorry, I don't. Honestly, our office isn't really about that. We don't have a lot of economists and that's not really one of the jobs we do.

Finance committee  Yes, it's a great question, and my office has been looking at that very carefully. We want to be sure that Canadians in need of help with their debts can get the help they need. The licensed insolvency trustee community has proven to be very nimble. They've added significant eff

Finance committee  I was at the OSB at the time as a deputy superintendent and certainly not on the insolvency side. Things went extremely well in 2009 and we were able to help a lot of debtors get through their financial difficulties, either with a bankruptcy or at the time, consumer proposals, wh

Finance committee  I think we have to recognize that household debt levels were incredibly high and were continuing to rise over the past several years. While the number of filings were high, the per capita numbers were stable. People have been able to somehow manage those rising debt levels. As I

Finance committee  Are you talking about farmers?

Finance committee  We are not involved in that aspect at all.

Finance committee  We reached about 158,000 total bankruptcies, and if I just open my slide, I can tell you where we were on the per capita number, because that was our apex. In 2009, we reached 5.83 filings on a consumer side per 1,000 adults.