COVID-19 has Canada’s banks worried about sickly loans, but they’re still raking in the cash | CBC News

If Canada’s big banks are the canary in the coal mine for the economy as a whole, then there was some good news this week, and some less good news.

While the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on Canadian society, Canada’s five biggest lenders — Royal Bank, Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank, CIBC and TD — remained profitable even as they set aside billions of dollars to offset possible losses from loans that might go bad in the coming months.

It was expected that measures to contain the pandemic, such as school and business closures, border shutdowns and travel restrictions, would grind economic activity to a halt, but the banks’ quarterly financial results for the three-month period up to April 30 were hotly anticipated because they are a deep dive into just how bad the economy was really doing.

If businesses like manufacturers, oil and gas companies, retailers and tech startups are having trouble paying their bills, that tends to show up at the big banks, which lend them money.

Analysts say one of the best ways of gauging how companies are doing is by paying attention to a banking metric known as loan loss provisions. That’s a complicated-sounding term for a fundamentally simple concept: how much banks set aside to pay for loans on their books they think might not get paid back.

Not all those loans will turn into losses. But paying attention to how much the banks are setting aside just in case is an excellent proxy for how worried they are.

Combined, Canada’s big five lenders set aside almost $11 billion last quarter to cover loans that aren’t currently being paid off as planned. That’s almost five times as much as they had set aside for bad loans in the same three-month period last year.

That’s the bad news. The good news? “They were bad, but not as bad as feared,” said Jim Shanahan, an analyst with investment firm Edward Jones who covers C