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The Mortgage Renewal Wave Just Peaked — Here's What the Data Actually Shows

Published August 30, 2026 For three years, "the mortgage renewal wall" has been the scariest phrase in Canadian personal finance — the idea that a flood of ultra-cheap, pandemic-era mortgages would come due at much higher rates and trigger a wave of forced sales. That wall is now mostly behind us. Two new 2026 surveys, one from Royal LePage and one from Rates.ca, show what actually happened when it hit. The short version: it hurt, budgets tightened hard for a lot of people, but the mass default many feared simply didn't show up. The last big group is renewing right now Royal LePage's 2026 Mortgage Renewal Survey, released August 19 and based on a Leger poll of 1,127 Canadians renewing this year, pins down where things stand: about 12% of all outstanding Canadian mortgages are five-year, fixed-payment loans taken out during the 2020–2022 ultra-low-rate window, and this is their last major renewal wave. The Bank of Canada's overnight rate sat at just 0.25% through m...

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Google Lays Off Hundreds of Employees in Hardware, Voice Assistant Teams Amid Cost-Cutting Drive

 

Google has laid off hundreds of employees working on its hardware, voice assistance and engineering teams as part of cost-cutting measures. 

The cuts come as Google looks towards “responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” the company said in a statement. The job cuts are part of a broader effort to reduce costs and streamline operations.

Google earlier said it was eliminating a few hundred roles, with most of the impact on its augmented reality hardware team. The cuts follow pledges by executives of Google and its parent company Alphabet to reduce costs  In a post on X — previously known as Twitter — the Alphabet Workers Union described the job cuts as “another round of needless layoffs”. The union wrote, “Our members and teammates work hard every day to build great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to fire our coworkers while making billions every quarter. We won’t stop fighting until our jobs are safe!”.


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