Finance Minister Bill Morneau said he is not considering any additional regulations to address private mortgage lenders’ growth.
“I’m not currently considering any stress tests on private mortgage lenders,” Morneau told reporters in Ottawa, according to a BNN Bloomberg report.
When asked if he was concerned about the rise of private lending in the Canadian mortgage market, Morneau said he is not looking at any specific measures.
“We’re always looking at the entire mortgage space to make sure we have a system that is providing the adequate protections for Canadians. That means we need to think about, obviously, the space that we are directly regulating and what our regulations do in terms of impacts on other parts of the provision of that sort of credit,” said Morneau. “But I don’t have anything specific in that regard right now.”
Morneau’s statements debunked a recent Reuters report that said the government was considering subjecting private lenders to the same mortgage stress-test rules imposed on banks to keep their rapid growth from destabilizing housing markets. The report cited three anonymous sources with “direct knowledge of the matter.”
