Finance committee  Certainly. Thank you for the question. As it relates to British Columbia, I'm a little concerned about the user-friendliness of that database. It's not easy to search. Ultimately, the disincentive of a beneficial ownership registry is.... I'll use a cliché. Let's say that you

Finance committee  Thank you. I think depreciated capital or accelerated depreciation in capital cost allowance is something that's certainly worth examining. The proof is in the pudding. It has worked in the past. There's no reason to think that it wouldn't work in the future. I'll refer the memb

Finance committee  Yes, this is a frustration. I don't understand that. I know the basic premise is that this is on privacy grounds, but that frankly does not make sense, because borrowers have already given the financial information to the lenders, and all that the lenders are looking for is a ye

Finance committee  That's a great question. Here I want to be careful not to criticize Statistics Canada. It does a great job with the resources that it is given. However, the reality is that when you look at the data availability in the United States, it's just an order of magnitude more detailed

Finance committee  This is a big discussion. I'll try to make it really simple. For the members that maybe haven't looked at this dynamic, in Canada we have a fairly vibrant private lending market. By and large, these are one-year mortgages. They are very short-term mortgages with high interest ra

Finance committee  I'm sorry, Mr. Chambers. I saw you. Were you waving at me there?

Finance committee  I cut that answer short, but I can elaborate if you want. I thought you were waving me off.

Finance committee  Yes, certainly. Look, I think it's important to recognize that there are no silver bullets. There's no simple solution. It's going to be a number of small, incremental policies that can move the needle, but there's certainly some low-hanging fruit there. I would say that the mo

Finance committee  Yes, that's another one that I think is worth looking at. Again, look, short-term rentals have been a part of the Canadian landscape in particular regions that tend to skew towards cottage and recreational properties. I don't fundamentally have an issue there. I worry about the

Finance committee  You've got the dynamic exactly right. The idea is that we hold payments constant, extend the amortization, and today we have a number of banks that have up to 20% of their mortgage book that is negatively amortizing. The Bank of Canada has done good work on this. They found tha

Finance committee  Mortgage rates broadly have been more or less stable over the last three or four weeks. They'll start to trend up based on the pricing of the bond markets. We should expect by this time next week that fixed mortgage rates will probably be 20 basis points, or 0.2%, higher. As to

Finance committee  Yes, I think it's very likely that they'll probably more than double. For context, we're starting from an extremely low base. We have 15 basis points of delinquencies, which is pretty much an all-time low. They will go up. Partly it's been masked by pandemic savings and by some

Finance committee  I agree. I think anything that incentivizes the municipalities to get on board and say no to Nimbyism is welcome. There are certainly demands that I imagine we need to explore, but I'll leave that for another time.

Finance committee  Certainly. I'll try to be brief. The current affordability dynamics will exert downward pressure on demand. I expect that we will see prices grind lower over the next six to eight months. Inventory is still remarkably low. There's not a lot to buy out there. The concern looki

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, committee members. I've covered Canadian housing and household credit trends on behalf of institutional investors for over a decade now. I previously testified before this committee in 2022 regarding housing's role in the cost-of-living crisi