Is mortgage life insurance mandatory?

Transcript

Welcome to our channel on mortgage insurance. My name is Glenn Cooke and I’m with Only Insurance. Today we’ll be discussing whether mortgage life insurance in Canada is mandatory.

Mortgage life insurance is not mandatory in Canada from a regulatory perspective. However, and this is a fairly technical answer, banks can require that you have life insurance in order to cover a debt. 

In practice however, banks do not typically require life insurance to cover your mortgage. They will ask if you want their coverage, but you can decline or simply respond that you have coverage elsewhere. This is sufficient for a typical Canadian mortgage. 

Where life insurance would be more often required by banks would be with business loans. Large business loans where repayment is predicated on the company owner will sometimes see the bank require life insurance as a condition of the loan. Again, this is for business loans, and is not normally the case with mortgages.

Of note, one thing the banks can never do is require you to purchase their life insurance. This is called tied selling and is strictly prohibited by the regulators. Nevertheless, even if the banks can’t require that you purchase their specific insurance, it’s often pretty highly suggested. You’re sitting in the bank signing papers, it gets offered to you, and many people just take it without shopping around for price or benefits. If that’s you, I recommend you view our video on mortgage life insurance vs term life insurance. 

If you’d like to look at term life insurance to cover your mortgage instead of mortgage life insurance, I’d encourage you to visit mortgageinsurance.ca. There you can compare term life insurance prices for different policies, look at adding critical illness insurance, and actually apply right online through the website. You can go there now by clicking on the mortgageinsurance.ca logo at the bottom of this video.

Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time.