The CMHC: Canada's mortgage monster

Chris Sorensen And Jason Kirby

It’s a familiar-sounding story to American ears. “The Canadian government mortgage apparatus echoes uncannily our experiences down here with Fannie and Freddie” says Jim Grant, author of the widely read Grant’s Interest Rate Observer newsletter. “CMHC has distorted the housing market by making homes, especially ones that are on the pricier end of the spectrum, more affordable and encouraged a lot of people to get in over their heads.”

Grant and other critics argue the CMHC’s balance sheet looks strikingly similar to both Fannie and Freddie if you compare the mortgages the agency insures against its equity. Using the CMHC’s 2010 forecasts, it insures $519.1 billion in mortgages against $9.9 billion in equity, which works out to around 1.9 per cent (although the CMHC says it has another $6.7 billion in “unearned” premiums that could be used toward future claims). By comparison, in 2007, at the peak of the bubble, Fannie Mae backed up US$2.7 trillion of mortgage-backed securities with US$40 billion of capital, or 1.5 per cent equity against its overall exposure. But the CMHC says its capital levels are double what the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions requires of mortgage insurers (though the CMHC is not regulated by the OFSI). But such assurances in the absence of transparent disclosure offer limited comfort. As C.D. Howe researcher Finn Poschmann wrote in a recent report: “Parliament and the voters to whom it answers have no formal documentation of the way these exposures are calculated or managed.”

What bothers Grant is that the CMHC’s government-backed guarantees encourage banks to feel they have less to lose if loans go bad. “The risk has been shifted, rather than reduced, from the stockholders and depositors of the big Canadian banks to the Canadian taxpayer,” he says. And if house prices fall and borrowers get into trouble, the ripples would run far and wide. “A sharp break in Canadian house prices would inflict terrific damage to consumer confidence, would hurt the Canadian labour market, and ultimately produce a lot of the unpleasant results that have been America’s burden to bear since 2007.”

The CMHC argues such concerns are overblown. It points out that the Canadian mortgage system is fundamentally different than in the U.S. That’s because mortgage interest is not tax-deductible, a relatively small number of mortgages are securitized, and lenders can generally go after homeowners who don’t make their payments. The CMHC also points to Canada’s low rate of mortgage arrears, currently less than one per cent. Finally, the industry never got swept up in the subprime lending trend, the CMHC says. “We don’t have those products in Canada,” says Pierre Serré, the CMHC’s vice-president of insurance product and business development. “And if we did, CMHC certainly did not insure them.” Lending weight to the CMHC’s claims, a 2009 IMF report called Canada’s residential mortgage markets “boring but effective.”

Canadian lenders didn’t go overboard with the sorts of gimmicky mortgage products—loans with low initial “teaser” rates or so-called NINJA loans (no income, no job or assets)—that got Americans into so much trouble. But it’s not like they shied away from taking risks. For two years beginning in 2006, the CMHC offered insurance on mortgages with amortization periods of up to 40 years, nearly double the traditional 25-year period, and loans with zero down payments. The products were later reined in by Ottawa after the U.S. housing market tanked.

Don Healy/Regina Leader-Post/CP

The CMHC dove into such high-risk products largely without supervision. While the government had previously relaxed conditions for guaranteeing mortgage insurance as part of a plan to introduce more private sector competition, it was the CMHC’s management and board that ultimately made the decision to go to 40-year amortization periods. In the same way, in 2007, the CMHC introduced a program for self-employed Canadians who have difficulty documenting their earnings to nonetheless obtain mortgage insurance by “stating” their income. While the program was restricted to borrowers with good credit ratings, one mortgage broker told Maclean’s self-employed Canadians were able to get much larger mortgages than those in the same field who had documented incomes. Then, a year ago, the CMHC backtracked and significantly tightened its rules on stated-income mortgages.

“We’re allowed to operate and make decisions with regards to mortgage insurance products and policies within the [government's] guarantee, and when we do so we advise the government of any changes,” says Peter De Barros, a spokesperson for the CMHC. Still, the move to riskier mortgage products drew the ire of then-Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, who sent a letter to CMHC chief executive Karen Kinsley in 2006 warning about the dangers of throwing fuel on a hot housing market. “A home purchaser is able to borrow at very low interest rates because you and I as taxpayers essentially guarantee that mortgage,” Dodge said during an interview earlier this year on Business News Network. “So it’s not at all unreasonable for us as taxpayers to say, ‘Look, Mr. Borrower, you’ve got to have an equity stake in this as well, so if things go really bad it’s not all on the Canadian taxpayer—part of it is on you.” (Dodge declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Critics say that, given what happened in the U.S., it’s irresponsible to not have someone watching over the CMHC. “They are the only major financial institution in Canada not regulated by OSFI,” says Ian Lee, an assistant professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business and a former bank manager. “Housing is so huge and the consequences are just so large. It’s not like they’re deciding what to do about the price of ballpoint pens.”

So how much risk have taxpayers been exposed to? The CMHC doesn’t reveal specific data about the credit exposure that it has taken on, other than to say it is manageable and in line with internal guidelines. As for the question of whether the CMHC’s policies could contribute to a housing crash, the agency says there’s no reason for Canadians to lose sleep. It says more than half of CMHC-insured mortgages have a loan-to-value ratio of less than 80 per cent based on the value of the original loan, and that the average equity in a CMHC-insured property is 45 per cent. “The mortgages are getting paid down—as a matter of fact, we see that about half of our folks made extra payments, more than just the minimum required principal payments,” says Serré, adding that rising home prices have also helped improve the debt picture.

But such aggregate figures don’t necessarily provide an accurate snapshot of how homeowners are faring, according to Poschmann at C.D. Howe. Important questions remain unanswered—like what is the geographic breakdown of its mortgages? Of those people with lower equity in their homes, what is the size of their mortgages? What classes of loans are they? What are their terms? “You can’t come up with an independent assessment of exposures based on the information they publish,” says Poschmann. “You can manage risks better with oversight and daylight, but right now we have pretty opaque books.”

While the CMHC says it has a sophisticated automated system to check creditworthiness of borrowers and property values, its biggest private sector competitor (which also has its mortgage insurance guaranteed by taxpayers, albeit only up to 90 per cent) nevertheless suggested during a 2007 hearing of the Senate banking committee that more than a third of all mortgages insured by the CMHC could be considered risky. Winsor Macdonell, the vice-president and general counsel of Genworth Financial, told the committee he assumed the CMHC’s portfolio looks similar to Genworth’s given that both provide mortgage insurance for the entire Canadian market. “When I talked about our portfolio, 36 per cent are people with low or poor credit,” he said. “Those are the people who are at risk.” Genworth declined to talk to Maclean’s for this story.

Serré declined to comment directly on Macdonell’s remarks. “I’m not exactly sure what low or poor credit is,” he says. “But I want to make clear that our mandate is not to get people into home ownership, our mandate is to provide the housing of choice. The last thing we want, as a government insurer, is to get people in a position where they can’t manage their debt.” For the sake of Canada and its fragile economic recovery, let’s hope he’s right.