Canada's mortgage insurers face lighter paperwork but the same tough questions about surviving a housing downturn under updated federal instructions.

The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions last updated its 2026 instructions for the Appointed Actuary's Report supplementary tables on September 22, 2026, spelling out how the country's federally regulated mortgage insurers must document their reserves each year. The Appointed Actuary's Report is the annual filing in which an insurer's own actuary attests to the value of its policy liabilities.

The update follows a letter dated September 11, 2026, from Mark Causevic, OSFI's managing director of insurers' financial resilience, confirming the mortgage insurer workbook has been trimmed from 19 tables to 18. OSFI made the same kind of cut to the templates used by federally regulated life insurers and property and casualty insurers, removing one table from each.

What survives the trim is the substance. Mortgage insurers must still run their books through three sensitivity tests meant to show how their reserves would hold up under financial stress. One recalculates liabilities using discount rates shifted 50 basis points in each direction. A second reworks reserves using unemployment rates a percentage point higher and lower than what the insurer actually used. A third repeats the exercise on house prices, testing values at 90 percent and 110 percent of what was used to determine reported liabilities.

The instructions also lay out the filing mechanics. Each workbook must reach OSFI's Regulatory Reporting System within 60 days of an insurer's fiscal year-end, prepared on a consolidated basis, with dollar figures in thousands of Canadian dollars, under the IFRS 17 accounting standard. Insurers cannot add, delete or rename tabs, or change how cells are formatted, and may only enter values from the workbook's built-in drop-down menus where those are provided.

OSFI says the new format is meant to make the data easier to feed directly into its own databases.

For an industry with only a handful of federally regulated mortgage insurers, the annual filing still carries real weight: the sensitivity tables are designed to show regulators how each insurer would fare if home prices fell, unemployment rose, or interest rates moved sharply in either direction.

The full instructions are available at https://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/en/data-forms/reporting-returns/filing-financial-returns/financial-reporting-instructions/instructions-mortgage-insurer-appointed-actuarys-report-aar-supplementary-tables-2026.