Canada Is Sliding Into Stagflation and Nobody Will Say It

Canadians are being told inflation is running around two and a half percent. The money supply is growing at seven to eight. Both of those cannot be true, and the gap between them is the reason everything feels harder than the official numbers say it should. That gap is the thread we pull on for an hour, and it goes somewhere bleak. The first is that nobody signs a five-year mortgage anymore. Jeff Mudrick has written roughly one all year. Everyone is taking two and three year terms, and when you ask them why, the answer usually is not about interest rates at all. It is about wanting the term to end when they think the chaos ends. Every year the term gets shorter, and every year the chaos does not end. The second is worse, because it has been sitting there for a decade and almost nobody knows. Your Ontario property taxes are calculated on what your home was worth on January 1, 2016. Not last year. 2016. The reassessment due in 2020 was postponed during COVID. The one due in 2024 never happened either, and a 2023 regulation extended the freeze. Mortgage applications right now routinely show an assessed value near three hundred thousand dollars against a property genuinely worth close to a million. That gap does not close gently. Whenever the province finally moves, a decade of price growth arrives on one bill, and nobody gets to phase in a decade of their own budget to match it. Jeff is a mortgage broker and this is his fourth time on the show. We get into the mechanics almost nobody explains: why the bank offering the best rate this month is doing it because of its own fiscal year end and not because it likes you, how the stress test quietly pushes buyers toward variable rates whether they want them or not, and the gap between what a lender says you can afford and what you can actually live on without eating instant noodles for five years. We also get into why interest rates are not actually the problem. The twenty year average for a five year fixed is about 4.18 percent. We are roughly there. A two hundred thousand dollar mortgage at twelve percent and a four hundred thousand dollar mortgage at four percent cost almost exactly the same every month. Same payment, twice the debt. That is the real story, and it is not the one people argue about. Fair warning: this one gets bleak in the middle. We talk about how inflation is actually calculated, why the number you are told is not the number you are living, and the economic condition where nothing works the way the textbook says it should.   Connect with Jeff Mudrick: Mortgages: Mudrick Mortgages For mortgage brokers: Rate Card Pro Thinking of buying or selling in the GTA? Call or text Adam at 647-328-8958. Adam Nadler | Vision Real Estate RE/MAX Your Community Realty, Brokerage adam@visionrealestate.ca | https://visionrealestate.ca This episode is general information and commentary, not mortgage, tax or financial advice for your situation. Rates, lender policies and qualifying rules referenced were current at the time of recording in September 2026 and change constantly. Property assessment and property tax policy are set by the Province of Ontario and your municipality, and no reassessment date has been announced. Speak to a licensed mortgage professional about your own file before acting on anything here. #CanadianMortgages #PropertyTaxes #TorontoRealEstate