It seems like everywhere you turn lately, someone’s dishing out financial advice. With RRSP season over and tax time almost upon us, I guess it’s just that time of year.

If you’re a homeowner and you have a mortgage, your ear might be tuned to any news about interest rates — and there has been a lot of that lately. What about mortgage financing? At BILD, we’ve been keeping an eye on the mortgage financing rules, especially since they were just tweaked by the federal government for the third time in the last three years.

In January, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced three changes to mortgage standards and they take effect March 18. The first change set the maximum amortization period to 30 years for borrowers with less than 20 per cent down. The second change was to the amount allowed when refinancing a mortgage, which will be lowered from 95 per cent to 85 per cent of the home value. The third change withdraws government insurance backing on non-amortizing lines of credit secured by homes, such as a home equity line of credit.

Between the 30-year amortization rule and the previous changes — like having to qualify using the five-year mortgage rate even if taking a lower variable rate, and having a minimum 20 per cent down for condo investors — we think the feds have gone far enough and hopefully not too far. The real worry is that any further limitations on access to homeownership will likely have an equal and opposite reaction in the form of fewer home sales, lost jobs and lower GST revenue.

We at BILD, and even at the national level at the Canadian Home Builders’ Association, understand that the finance minister took aim at some government policies that allow people to get in over their heads in debt or buy homes that they cannot afford. It was a pre-emptive action that stopped things from getting out of hand. As Edmonton-based homebuilder and new president of the CHBA, Vince Laberge, put so eloquently at the national conference last month, we need the same approach in relation to the government’s role in inflating housing costs and the resulting increase in household debt.

We are in a time when government-imposed charges on new housing construction are increasing at a faster rate than housing prices. Low interest rates have masked the increasing burden of these costs and have hidden the very real impact on housing affordability and choice. The industry believes tighter mortgage rules must be accompanied by a reduction in government-imposed costs on housing consumers — it is vital for housing affordability.

As it happens, I have a suggestion for Flaherty, and it’s to eliminate the wall of tax which is created by the claw-back of the GST new housing rebate on homes priced between $350,000 and $450,000. The Province of Ontario got it right when it adopted a graduated approach to calculating the HST under which the rebate is capped at $24,000 but not pulled out from under you once you spend the extra dollar over the threshold price, which Ontario happened to set at $400,000, but which really should be $525,000, federally and provincially.

With a federal budget pending, Flaherty has a golden opportunity to address a long-standing design flaw in the GST on new homes. Meanwhile, if you’re hoping to qualify under the old rules, you’ve got less than a week to go.

Stephen Dupuis is president and CEO of the Building Industry and Land Development Association. You can follow BILD on Twitter @bild-gta, on Facebook at bild-gta and on YouTube. The views expressed are those of the president. Email president@bildgta.ca.