If the Canadian left-wing corporate media were half-awake, they’d be busy exploring the parallels between the U.S. housing market in 2008 and Canada’s today. One supposes that drawing attention to the freight train bearing down on mortgage holders would be too unwoke.

For Johnny Chen, a promotion and a substantial salary increase was not enough to help him find a home in Vancouver’s white-hot housing market, he told Fortune.

Chen, who sits at the top income bracket, told the publication he’s been scrolling through listings in the city every day for six months to no avail. Even single-family homes priced at $3 million need “substantial renovation work,” he said, making him “trigger shy.”

“It’s hard to wrap my head around prices right now. Vancouver’s real estate market is a bit crazy,” he said.

A soft landing? Not bloody likely. If you insist on engineering a recession, don’t think that the carnage will magically stop with the withdrawal of help wanted ads. It’s not just “virtual” jobs that will disappear, but real ones as well: the real jobs of real homeowners who will no longer be able to make their real mortgage payments on a real house.

For Macklem’s part, he suggested skeptics might be discounting the unusually high number of unfilled positions. He doesn’t deny that there will be demand destruction from higher interest rates, but he thinks companies could respond by taking down job postings rather than throwing people out of work. In other words, a soft landing is possible because any nosedive will be aimed straight at a cushion of aspirational hiring, not existing employment.

Grab a coffee: What does the American landscape truly look like?

Given the ongoing exponential rise in debt levels, this should not come as a surprise to anyone. Expect things to get worse as the marginal debtor has to roll more and more debt at higher rates.

Canadians are feeling the pinch. The MNP Consumer Debt Index out this morning found that more than half of Canadians surveyed say they are already feeling the effects of higher interest rates. Almost 40% say that rising rates could drive them closer to bankruptcy, up four percentage points from December.

Thirty-one per cent say they already don’t make enough to cover their bills and debt payments.

If the Bank of Canada follows through on rate hikes tomorrow and more in the coming months, it’s beyond a doubt that the housing market is going to take a beating. The mainstream financial media appears to be slowly waking up to this fact.

For borrowers with a variable rate mortgage, some tough choices may  be on the horizon:

If the Bank raises its overnight rate by 50 bps tomorrow that variable rate rises to 1.65% and the monthly payment to $3,019, according to Ratehub.ca’s calculator.

That’s $172 more per month or $2,064 more per year in mortgage payments.

If the central bank hikes another 50 bps at its June meeting, as some expect, that would put the total rate increase this year at 125 basis points. The homeowner above would now have a mortgage rate of 2.15% and monthly payments of $3,197.

With huge numbers of Canadian homeowners treating their homes as if they were ATMs, it only takes a small increase in interest rates to push the marginal debtor into default. The fifty basis point hike predicted in the article should be enough to get an avalanche started.

Regulators are already on high alert concerning a popular loan product offered by major financial institutions that combines both a mortgage and a secured line of credit because the loan can be up to 80 per cent of the home’s value, compared to 65 per cent on a traditional secured line of credit.

The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions has been keeping an eye on these popular loan products and how the banks handle them because they now represent a significant portion of Canada’s uninsured household mortgage debt.

According to figures compiled by the Bank of Canada, combined mortgages and HELOC products grew to $710.3 billion at the end of last year, representing 41 per cent of total real estate secured lending. Their share rose from 37 per cent in the first quarter of 2019.