The Canadian Bankers Association has recently released the Mortgages in Arrears statistics through December.

Worth noting that the previous record high in November for the province of Alberta has been surpassed , and is now sitting at 0.75% (up from 0.72% in November, and 0.40% a year prior).

For the whole of Canada the rate was up just slightly, now sitting at 0.45% (up from 0.33% a year ago).

Most of the other provinces fluctuated within a mere 0.01%, except Saskatchewan, where it climbed 0.02%, but is still a national low, 0.29% (up from 0.23% a year prior).

The Atlantic provinces continue to have the second highest rate (a distant second behind Alberta), sitting at 0.51% (up from 0.42% a year prior).

British Columbia continues their slow but steady climb, and sit at 0.40% as of December, up from 0.23% a year ago.

However,  when viewed in perspective, it appears that the absolute number of arrears in Canada is still very low when compared to other countries, with less than 5 out of 1,000 Canadian mortgagors being late on payments.

Also, it must be taken into account that although there are 5,699 more borrowers in arrears than a year ago, 91,986 more mortgages have been processed during that same period, out of four million active mortgages in total. These numbers show that on an absolute basis, arrears have not been excessively high in Canada.

The single factor that has always most influenced the rate of mortgage arrears is employment,  more even than rising interest rates.
The chart below from Will Dunning Economic Research illustrates the relationship between Canadian employment rate and the percentage of mortgage arrears:

As it can easily be seen, when employment goes up, arrears go down, and when employment goes down, arrears go up, which makes perfect sense.  It isn’t very surprising that when mortgage takers are employed they have no difficulties honoring their debts and when there are more people employed there is a larger pool of people who qualify for mortgages.