When socializing with a vice-president of a Canadian bank, I asked him why Canada never felt such a economic punch verses it's southern neighbor. His answers might not be liked on these forums, but the results are clear.
1) The Canadian government has put in place stricter regulations on the chartered banks, in other words they could not do total free market stuff that was really stupid.
2) If you got a mortgage with a major bank it stayed with that bank, in an event of an issue you were less likely to get foreclosed on, as American Institutions packaged those mortgages up and sold them off, to all kind of different financial companies, in many cases these mortgages now had multiple holders and any one of them could say no, and that meant foreclose.
3) The lenders upsold their customers to get bigger mortgages, saying the market is going to keep going up. An example, lets say a house was worth $250,000, the buyer put the minimum down payment. And was set to get the rest as a mortgage, the lender getting commission on the size of mortgage would, say hey that house according market trends will be worth $350,000 in a couple years so lets give you another 100K and you can buy that new car, take that nice trip, renovate, basically spend that money. This artificially inflated the American economy. Another point made was that when the house foreclosed they were able to keep all the goods separate from the house they had purchased with the inflated mortgage money, as the money was only on the house. When this scheme popped, it drastically reduced the amount of money going into the system, forcing "The Great Recession".
Canada never did these things, it least that's what he told me, and he had spent 20 years in the industry, and it made sense to me.
