Canadians will run up their credit cards, fall behind on their utilities, and delay car payments.

One thing they can't do in large numbers is fall behind on mortgage payments.

GTA residents facing high interest rates and inflation may find some comfort in mortgage delinquency figures that indicate losing a home to the bank is rare on this side of the border, while there are some upcoming challenges, it doesn't make sense to equate the mortgage crisis scenes in the US with the global recession in the early 2000s.

Housing and finance experts say our banking system, even our workforce composition and cultural differences between the two countries, kept crime rates low through tough economic stretches in Canada.

However, they do not rule out the fact that some Canadians are at risk of falling behind on their mortgages.

The expert in mortgage and consumer trends at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said the data showed that Canadian mortgage delinquency rates remained low during the recent global recession and other economic downturns including housing and the pandemic in 2017.

She says that delinquencies - loans that are 90 days or more overdue - are a good indicator of mortgage default rates.

She said: "In Canada, the mortgage delinquency rate is still much lower than in the United States."

"Even in the nineties when we saw that peak, we were about 0.65 percent - less than 1 percent.

In the United States, when there was a recession in 2008, [the default rate] approached 11, 12 percent," Borasa-Ochoa said.