Published 5 Oct 2026
The Bank of Canada Says No Single Policy Fixes Housing Affordability: What to Assume in Your Plan
A senior Bank of Canada official argues rate moves are too blunt to solve housing costs. Here is how to plan for that reality.
On October 1, 2026, Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers gave a speech in Victoria, B.C., on why housing affordability has been so hard to fix. Her core message: no single policy will do it, and interest rates in particular are too blunt a tool to target housing without side effects on the rest of the economy.
What the speech said
Rogers looked at the problem from three angles: provincial regulation of real estate practices, the mortgage stress test introduced in 2017, and central banking. Her argument was that tighter rules and stronger lending standards made the system safer, but did little to make homes cheaper as prices kept climbing. She noted that house prices rose roughly 50% in about two years during the pandemic boom, and that about half of all bank lending is tied to residential real estate. Her conclusion was that coordinated supply-side solutions are needed, not monetary policy alone.
What it means for your budget
The practical takeaway is that you should not build a plan that depends on rate cuts to rescue housing costs. With the policy rate holding at 2.25%, the Bank is signalling that affordability relief, if it comes, will arrive slowly through new supply rather than through cheaper borrowing.
How to reflect this in your projection
- Keep housing costs flat-to-rising in your expense projection rather than assuming a drop in mortgage or rent costs.
- If you plan to buy, model your purchase at today's prices and rates, then test a scenario where prices stay elevated for several years.
- If you renew a mortgage soon, run renewal scenarios at the current rate and slightly higher, and compare the payment impact against your income.
- Since housing is likely your largest liability or expense, check how much of your income it consumes and how that ratio changes if other costs rise.
In AffordaFlow, you can enter your housing costs as an expense or mortgage liability, then duplicate your projection and adjust the assumptions to compare a base case with a higher-cost case.
Source: Bank of Canada, Canada's housing affordability dilemma (October 1, 2026).
This article is informational and not financial advice.