Lender types (banks, monolines, credit unions, B-lenders, private, MICs)
Canadian mortgages come from six lender types that trade off price, accessibility, and how forgiving they are about your income and credit, from cheap-but-broker-only monolines to expensive-but-flexible private lenders.
Canada's mortgage lenders sort into a handful of camps, and where you land shapes both your rate and whether you qualify at all. The big banks (RBC, TD, Scotiabank and the rest) are the default: they take deposits, sell you everything from chequing accounts to credit cards, and keep your mortgage on their own books. Convenient, rarely the sharpest price. Monolines (think MCAP, First National, CMLS) do one thing: mortgages. They don't run branches or take deposits, they fund loans and often sell them onward, and they pass the lower overhead through as keener rates. The catch: most monolines are broker-only, so you can't walk in off the street. You reach them through a mortgage broker, which is a large part of why brokers exist.
Credit unions are member-owned and, crucially, most are regulated by their province rather than by the federal regulator, OSFI. That matters for the stress test. OSFI's B-20 guideline forces federally regulated lenders (banks, federal trust companies) to qualify you at the greater of your contract rate plus 2% or a 5.25% floor, even though you'll actually pay the lower contract rate. Provincially regulated credit unions sit outside B-20, so they can, in principle, qualify you on more flexible terms. Many voluntarily apply a similar test anyway, and the flexibility varies by province and institution, so treat it as a door worth knocking on, not a guarantee.
When your income, credit, or property doesn't fit the "A" lender box, you move down the risk ladder. B-lenders (Home Trust, Equitable Bank and similar) specialize in borrowers who are self-employed, newer to Canada, or rebuilding credit. They charge higher rates and often a lender fee, and the loan is usually meant as a bridge back to an A lender in a year or two. Below that sit private lenders and MICs (Mortgage Investment Corporations, pools of investor money lent out as mortgages). These are asset-focused: they care more about the property and your equity than your income, they lend short-term, and they're the most expensive tier by a wide margin. Private and MIC money solves a timing or qualification problem; it isn't a place to park a mortgage long-term.
One structural point worth naming: the lenders with the best pricing are frequently the ones you can't access directly. That's not an accident of the market, it's how the distribution is built.