OTTAWA—The Trudeau government is looking for ways to make home-buying more affordable for millennials, Finance Minister Bill Morneau said Tuesday as he held prebudget public events in the Toronto suburbs.
Morneau made the comment after giving a speech in Aurora, Ont., where he was asked if Ottawa has any plans to help first-time buyers enter the housing market at a time of rising interest rates and mortgage costs.
“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,” he said. “But I don’t have anything specific in that regard right now.”
Reuters reported on Jan. 25 that Canada was considering subjecting private lenders to the same mortgage stress test rules faced by banks, to prevent housing market destabilization from lenders’ rapid growth. The report cited three unnamed people with direct knowledge of the matter.
