Mortgage delinquencies since 2022 have more than quadrupled in Toronto.  Alongside higher payments, homeowners in the city are grappling with greater levels of household debt due to elevated real estate costs, while individual real estate investors face rising costs and falling rents. Falling home prices and slowing sales and a weak job market are also hampering people’s ability to cope with rising mortgage payments.

That sounds bad, right?

Mortgage delinquencies have more than quadrupled?

Damn, how is the world still spinning?

But I want to go to the CMHC report for a moment; the one which I linked above.

I want to quote directly from the report and we can see if the narrative (spin?) changes at all.

Check out this excerpt:

In Toronto’s struggling housing market, the mortgage arrears rate in the region has more than quadrupled from post-pandemic lows.

Does that look the same as the excerpt from the Financial Post article?

Nope!

Not even close!

The Financial Post article is missing four very, very important words: “….from post-pandemic lows.”

That’s incredibly important to the context of the story, and yet it’s being left out of virtually every article being written about mortgage delinquencies in Canada, from every major media outlet.

Now, let me flush out the above excerpt a little bit more:

In Toronto’s struggling housing market, the mortgage arrears rate in the region has more than quadrupled from post-pandemic lows. While arrears remain low, they’re projected to continue rising over the next year.

Again, we’re gaining more context!

The important words here are: “….while arrears remain low.”

They do remain low.  They arelow.  They’re projected to rise, but that would still make them low.

So then, what’s all this talk of quadrupling?

In September of 2022, we hit the lowest level of mortgage delinquencies at 0.06%.

In December of 2025, that number had risen to 0.28%.

There’s your “quadruple” right there.

But without proper context, and without measuring these numbers on a relative basis, you’re going to simply assume that this “quadrupling” signals the level of doom that the headlines want you to.

If memory serves me correctly, I wrote a blog post on this subject about one year ago.  I distinctly remember making these charts with the data available through the CMHC.

Mortgage delinquencies did increase over the last year, and there’s no denying this.

But mortgage delinquencies are still well below anything outside of pandemic-affected levels, as the above chart shows.

What was also left out of the media coverage on this topic was the positivity in the CMHC report, but that comes as no surprise, as most of the headlines were click-bait in nature.

Here’s an excerpt from the CMHC report:

Mortgage arrears are rising but remain below historical levels

With financial pressure increasingly weighing on households in a very tangible way, mortgage arrears have been steadily increasing nationally since late 2023. This trend is evident across the many mortgage arrears indicators in Canada, each coming from different data sources. While this upward trend is clear, mortgage arrears levels remain low compared to earlier periods of economic difficulty. This reflects several underlying factors:

1. Mortgage borrowers continue to show strong resilience.

Canadian households have been playing financial Tetris very well, adjusting their budgets and even making some sacrifices to make ends meet. As long as income remains steady, most households are staying on track. Historically, however, rising mortgage arrears have been closely tied to increases in unemployment. Without stable income, even the most carefully structured budgets can be quickly disrupted.

2. Homeowners have prioritized short-term affordability over long-term debt exposure.

At renewal, most mortgage consumers chose to increase their amortization period to lower their monthly mortgage payments. This has kept payment increases smaller than expected, even though it means paying more interest and carrying their mortgage for a longer time. Choosing longer amortizations suggests that buyers are prioritizing either accessing homeownership or reducing immediate debt pressures over optimizing long-term financial health. As housing has become increasingly unaffordable, this trend highlights a growing reliance on short-term liquidity pressures at the expense of long-term wealth accumulation.

3. Income growth and labour market conditions have been generally solid…until recently.

While Canada’s labour market has softened, with unemployment rising, this increase has been concentrated among younger workers and recent immigrants—groups that are typically not yet homeowners.

4. Regulation has played an important role in limiting mortgage arrears growth.

Mortgage arrears could have increased more significantly and at a faster pace without regulation. Canada has gone through a wave of regulatory tightening since the global financial crisis (see Appendix 2). Even though Canadian homeowners felt the 2008 to 2009 recession less intensely than our southern neighbors, the federal government introduced a series of changes. The goal was to protect overall financial stability in Canada.

Notably, mandatory mortgage stress testing was introduced, in 2016 for insured mortgages and 2018 for uninsured mortgages. The stress test requires borrowers to qualify for their loans at higher potential interest rates. This means that when mortgage consumers qualified for their mortgage loans a few years ago, their ability to handle higher payments was assessed based on their income at the time. This measure helped ensure they could afford a rate increase.

Fast-forward almost a decade, and recent trends show that the stress test has served its purpose. Even with interest rate shocks, arrears have risen gradually rather than sharply. Without the safeguards of the stress test, the increase in arrears could have been much steeper. That said, it’s not bulletproof. As outlined earlier, risks are becoming more evident in certain regions, like Toronto and, to some extent, Vancouver.