When a major consumer lender restates its financial results, suspends its dividend, amends its financing arrangements and reveals a $5.51-billion loan book under acute stress, the temptation is to call it a company story. A management failure. An audit failure. A market failure.
Goeasy is all of those things. But the deeper story here is not corporate. It is regulatory.
Non-bank consumer lending in Ontario is not a niche. It is not a fringe. It is a significant and growing segment of the provincial credit market, serving hundreds of thousands of Ontarians who cannot qualify for credit from a bank at standard rates.
Goeasy, Fairstone, Money Mart and a growing field of online lenders serve the borrowers that chartered banks screen out. They do so at high rates, with limited disclosure obligations and — in Ontario — with no dedicated conduct regulator overseeing them.
Goeasy alone held a $5.51-billion loan portfolio at year-end 2025. Ontario is its single largest market, representing 41% of that book — roughly $2.26 billion in non-prime consumer loans originated and serviced in one province.
Because goeasy is a provincially incorporated lender, it falls entirely outside the federal consumer protection framework that governs chartered banks. The responsibility for oversight is Ontario’s alone. Ontario holds no licence registry for these lenders. Ontario collects no origination data. Ontario tracks no delinquency trends and runs no complaints channel for borrowers in this market.
The province does not just lack the tools to intervene. It lacks the tools to see. Let us be precise about what that means — and what it does not mean.
A conduct regulator would not have prevented goeasy’s collapse. The deterioration at its LendCare division was a credit underwriting failure — a misjudgement of risk in auto and power sports financing that no provincial licensing regime would be designed to catch. Boards, auditors and credit analysts are the right people for that job.
A conduct regulator would have done something more fundamental. It would have known this market — how large it was, who was borrowing in it, at what rates and on what terms. It would have had a statutory mandate to monitor conduct across disclosure, collections and sales practices, and a channel through which borrowers could report problems before they became crises. Ontario has none of that. The province chose not to build it.
Consider who those borrowers are. Goeasy’s typical customer earns approximately $62,000 a year and carries a median credit score of 590. The weighted average interest rate across its portfolio in 2024 was 29.3%. Fairstone’s secured personal loans run from 19.99% to 25.99%; its unsecured loans start at 26.99%. Money Mart’s instalment loans carry an annual percentage rate of 34.28%.
These are not borrowers with options. They are low-income Canadians — many of them newcomers, many carrying damaged credit from job loss, illness or divorce — who have been turned away by a bank and are paying a steep premium for being served elsewhere.
A bank customer who is mistreated has the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada and a bank’s internal complaints process standing behind them. An Ontario non-bank borrower paying 29% on a $15,000 instalment loan who believes they have been mistreated can turn only to the Consumer Protection Act — legislation more applicable to a consumer unhappy with the sofa they purchased.
When a lender with the scale of goeasy contracts sharply, its borrowers do not graduate to a bank. For many, there is no next option. A sudden contraction in non-prime lending at this scale does not show up in any regulator’s data. No one tracks where displaced borrowers go. No one is required to find out.
At goeasy, that contraction is already underway — and Ontario has no institutional machinery to measure its human cost.
Ontario has known about this market for years. It identified the problem in 2021 and consulted on it. Three years later, it had a vehicle to act — the Consumer Protection Act, 2023. It chose not to.
The high-cost credit provisions contemplated in the 2021 consultation were quietly dropped. Ontario produced a statute that did not address the problem its consultation had already identified. Meanwhile, six other provinces moved forward with high-cost credit licensing frameworks.
Identifying consumer harm and then choosing to do nothing about it has become the provincial default. The 2026 budget postponed the managing general agent licensing framework — a consumer protection measure years in the making — citing the need for more stakeholder consultation. It also chose not to address consumer harms identified in a legislative review of the mortgage broker sector.
In these cases, as in the case of non-bank lending, the province has known what needs to be done. It has simply chosen not to do it. This is not regulatory caution. It is regulatory dereliction.