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This week began with an unusual apology. Evan Siddall, the president and chief executive of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, took to Twitter to acknowledge that the federal agency had erred last year when it forecast that the pandemic-induced economic collapse might cause house prices to fall by as much as 18 percent.

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Despite the pandemic, real estate sales are strong in Vancouver.Credit…Chris Helgren/Reuters
Instead, of course, Canada is talking again about whether most of the country is in a soon-to-burst real estate bubble. In Vancouver last month, the benchmark price for detached homes rose by 13.7 percent compared with a year earlier, reaching 1.6 million Canadian dollars. In the Toronto area, the average selling price for detached homes rose by 23.1 percent over the same time period, and a composite price that includes all kinds of housing topped 1 million dollars.

A sellers’ market prevails in many parts of the country, even at a time of economic distress for many. After my mother died earlier this year, I was surprised to learn that bidding wars, something I associated with Toronto and Vancouver, were now common in my hometown, Windsor, Ontario, for sales of even relatively modest houses like hers. In my neighborhood in Ottawa, a city that posted a record number of house sales last month, little time elapses before “for sale” signs are plastered with “sold” stickers.

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In Toronto this week a rundown, one-car garage sold in three days for 729,000 dollars, its value being the land underneath it.

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Even Ottawa’s traditionally slower-paced real estate market is soaring.Credit…Ian Austen/The New York Times
But the pandemic didn’t start that way. In his Twitter posts, Mr. Siddall noted that during the first months of the crisis, the real estate market had severely contracted.

About a quarter of Canadians were on emergency income support after their jobs were suspended because of shutdowns, large numbers of Canadians were deferring their mortgage payments, and Mr. Siddall’s agency had stepped in to buy 150 billion dollars in mortgage securities to keep the market alive. And on top of that, prices in many places were, in Mr. Siddall’s view, already unsustainable.

A report from his agency shows why — despite those factors — the market soared instead of floundering.

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