Bet_Noire via Getty Images

Canadian mortgage growth is flying high again, and all it took was a little time (and lower interest rates). Scotiabank Economics notes that Canadian household mortgage credit increased by 5.2 per cent on a month-over-month basis in June, in seasonally adjusted terms. Household mortgage credit hasn’t grown so rapidly since July 2017, according to Scotiabank. Watch: The best places to buy a house in Canada in 2019, according to MoneySense. Story continues below.

“Mortgage growth has surely rebounded after a period of deceleration from early-2017 to its mid-2018 trough which was induced by a series of measures aimed at tackling runaway home prices,” write Juan Manuel Herrera, a Scotiabank economist, and Alena Bystrova, a research analyst, in a report. Specifically, Herrera and Bystrova refer to foreign-homebuyer taxes in Metro Vancouver and Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe region, which includes the Greater Toronto Area.

They also cite mortgage stress testing that federal policymakers introduced in January 2018. The rules, drafted by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, a financial-sector watchdog, set a higher bar for uninsured-mortgage applicants through a new stress test. The test requires these borrowers to qualify at a rate that is either two percentage points points higher than what’s on their contract or matches the Bank of Canada’s qualifying rate — whichever is higher.