Finance committee  Those committee meetings are confidential and chaired by the deputy minister of finance. I'm going to keep my counsel with respect to that as well.

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, the aim that the honourable member has referred to is stability or resilience in the face of volatility. The strategy is to build buffers in the system. Buffers could include those at the borrower level, which I spoke about earlier with the minimum qualifying rate. Buf

Finance committee  The individual buffers I talked about—for example, the minimal qualifying rate—would just be for homebuyers. That would be the demographic. On the other buffers, I should have been clearer. They refer to either institutions overall, so federally regulated financial institutions,

Finance committee  Yes. When we think about residential mortgage risk, Mr. Chair, we think about a variety of factors. Some of them, like the fast rise in housing prices, give us cause for concern and can foreshadow a deterioration in mortgage credit risk. Other elements, for example, debt servic

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, is that question for me?

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, the underwriting decisions—and that is an underwriting decision—are decisions for the banks, but we're not disinterested in those. We have a principles-based regulation system. We do not assign the banks rules but we assign the principles and expectations we expect the

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, our responsibility as the prudential, financial institutions regulator is to ensure that there is capital and other margins of safety so that credit quality remains high and available to Canadians when they need it. We're not the office to do an in-depth study on sou

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for reminding me that I hadn't answered that part of the question. In our world, we worry about financial services. To be candid, I don't spend a lot of time on other sectors, just to be clear. Insofar as inflation might soak up the savings of Canadians w

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, I used to be a stock market analyst. I'm not currently. We at OSFI aren't stock market analysts. What we constantly ask ourselves is, if there is a market correction, do we have the buffers, the capital, the liquidity in the system, to absorb that? We work hard at

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, there's a two-part answer. With regard to the first part on how we measured accommodative relief provided by the banks through the COVID shock, there were approximately 750,000 mortgagors or borrowers with mortgages who were given mortgage deferrals of six months. That

Finance committee  The direct answer to the member's question is, yes, we have been testing for that. We've done it for many years. It long predates my arrival at OSFI. The formal way we incorporate that resilience into the system is through something we call the “minimum qualifying rate for unins

Finance committee  As a financial regulator and as the head of OSFI, I should never be too confident or overly confident in financial stability. You want a regulator who is always looking over the horizon to see what risks are coming. Having said that, the margin of safety we have with the borrower

Finance committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair, and committee members. Thank you for the opportunity to answer questions today. I intend to be brief, as I know you have some questions for me. I would also like to acknowledge that I am speaking from traditional unceded territory of the Anishinabek N