ℹ️Also below • A landlord "trick" to bypass rent control • BoC repo action triggers liquidity fears • CMLS revamps mortgage broker incentives • Mortgage Bytes This could be the best year for mortgage investment corporation (MIC) returns in decades, at least for some of them. That's the outlook

The thorn in big banks' side will soon be gone. After a shoddy review by the Competition Bureau, the Finance Minister has given HSBC's merger with RBC the bureaucratic blessing we all saw coming. HSBC was the one Big 6 challenger with low enough uninsured funding costs

Credit unions are an afterthought for many Canadians. Yet, CUs are critical to the mortgage ecosystem because they compete in ways that banks don't.

With cutthroat mortgage competition, plummeting insured volumes and margins so thin they'd starve a supermodel, it's been way more challenging to make money in insured lending. That and non-stop regulatory tightening have inspired mortgage finance companies to jump headfirst into the alternative lending pool. Strive is