A for sale sign is pictured in front of a home in Vancouver, B.C., Sept. 22, 2016. A proposal by Canada's banking regulator to expand "stress tests" for mortgage borrowers will reduce how much house Canadians can afford by 21 per cent, says a new report from mortgage comparison site Ratehub.

A proposal by Canada's banking regulator to expand "stress tests" for mortgage borrowers will reduce how much house Canadians can afford by 21 per cent, says a new report from mortgage comparison site Ratehub.

Reducing affordability by that much is likely to lead to a 10- to 20-per-cent decline in house prices, said James Laird, co-founder of Ratehub.

"If implemented in their current form, the effects of these changes will be significant. When buyers can qualify for less mortgage financing, it puts significant downward pressure on home prices," Laird said in an email to HuffPost Canada. 

The usual seasonal bounce in re-sale homes between September and October was more pronounced than usual this year in the Toronto region, growing 12 per cent.

But there were still 2,597 — about 27 per cent — fewer sales this October compared to the same month last year.

Home prices also rose 2.3 per cent year over year in October, but new numbers from the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) on Thursday showed some areas are doing better than others.

The average price of a home — including all housing types from apartments to detached houses with yards — rose 2.3 per cent to $780,104, compared to $762,691 last year.

But detached house prices were down 2.5 per cent across the region — a 4 per cent decline in the 905 area to an average price of $910,488 and, a 1.1 per cent drop in Toronto to about $1.3 million.

The Sobeys grocery business will be cutting about 800 office jobs across Canada.

Its chief executive, Michael Medline, says the job cuts are part of efforts to create one national organization out of five regional businesses. Medline says only office employees are affected by today’s announcement.

Besides the Sobeys banner, the company operates Safeway stores in western Canada and the FreshCo discount brand.

You don’t have to be a macro-focused investor to take notice of what the Bank of Canada has been doing this year. Two surprise interest rate increases from the central bank have been accompanied by surges in the 10-year Government of Canada bond yield, as investors appear to be finally looking ahead to the beginning end of an extremely long period of low or declining rates.

“It seems like the sentiment is that rates have bottomed out, so that’s really on investors’ minds,” said Tim Caulfield, portfolio manager at Calgary-based Franklin Bissett Investment Management. ”

The co-lead portfolio manager of the $3.2 billion Franklin Bissett Canadian Equity Fund, which he runs with the firm’s chief investment officer, Garey Aitken, believes valuations in many parts of the Canadian equity market pose a fair amount of risk to future potential returns — and low rates are largely responsible.

“The grab for yield has been going on for a long time, but we continue to see much too much emphasis on dividend yield,” Caulfield said.

Dividends are just one component of the total return picture at Franklin Bissett, where a bottom up, growth at a reasonable price (GARP) approach rooted in fundamental research, supersedes any attempts to make macroeconomic predictions. It also includes a long-term focus targeting businesses that demonstrate good visibility for the next five to 15 years.

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