Editorial policy

RenewalRate.ca is an independent Canadian publication covering the residential mortgage renewal market. This page sets the standards we hold ourselves to: editorial independence from our affiliate relationships, the source-tier framework behind every claim, the partner-relevance disclosure rule, the corrections protocol, and the cadence on which we re-verify time-sensitive content.

Editorial independence

The editorial framework, ranking logic, claim-verification rules, and update cadence are owned by the editor and are not subject to partner approval. Affiliate partners do not see articles before they go live. They do not review drafts, suggest edits, comment on rankings, or sign off on comparisons. The framework that decides which lender, product, or rate appears in which context is documented in the methodology and applied uniformly across articles, regardless of whether a lender named in the piece is a referral partner.

Where a partner's product is named in an article, we cover it on the same evidentiary basis we apply to non-partner products: a Tier A or Tier B primary source, a verbatim quote, a Wayback snapshot, and a screenshot. Partner status changes none of those requirements. If a partner cannot meet the source standard for a claim we would otherwise make about its product, the claim is reframed, removed, or held in commentary-only context.

Affiliate disclosure

RenewalRate.ca earns referral commissions when readers request a mortgage quote and that request is routed to one of our brokerage partners, currently Homewise, who is the FSRA-licensed entity in the partnership. RenewalRate.ca does not solicit, negotiate, or recommend specific mortgage products for specific borrowers; we publish facts and route quote requests under the Ontario Regulation 407/07 referral exemption. Commissions are paid on funded referrals only, never on coverage, ratings, or placement.

Material connections under Canadian competition law are disclosed plainly on every article that contains an affiliate link, near the top of the page rather than in the footer. The full referral-economics disclosure is published at /disclosure.

The presence of an affiliate relationship does not influence the editorial framework. The framework is documented, deterministic, and applies uniformly: same tier ladder, same verbatim rule, same deploy-gate detectors, same cadence. The framework was not designed to favour any partner and is not modified for any partner. If the framework's outputs reflect well on Homewise relative to a Big Six lender on a given claim, that is because the framework's inputs (broker-channel rate transparency, primary-source documentation, FSRA licensing) reward those properties; if the framework's outputs reflect poorly on Homewise on a particular dimension, the article says so.

Partner-relevance flag: full transparency

Every claim in the verification audit is reviewed for partner relevance. A claim is flagged partner_relevance: true when its substance touches the comparison between Homewise's broker-channel offer and a competing channel (typically a Big Six branch rate or an aggregator's best-rate row). The flag does not mean the claim is biased; it means the claim is one a reader should know was reviewed against the affiliate relationship before it was published.

As of the most recent audit pass (May 2026), 21 claims across the eight published articles carry the partner_relevance flag. The flag is rendered visibly in the audit entry and is not buried in build metadata. The flagged-claim breakdown is published in the audit at /audit.

Flagging does not exempt a claim from the deploy gate. Flagged claims must still pass all thirteen detectors: source URL resolves, verbatim on page, numbers in evidence chain, atom-level coverage, Wayback snapshot present, screenshot present, calculator parity passes, tier and grade present, exemption flag legal, and so on. The flag is additive transparency, not a substitute for verification.

Source-tier framework

RenewalRate.ca uses a four-tier source-authority ladder, applied to every claim. The full definition is published in the methodology; in summary:

A second axis, evidence strength, is applied alongside the tier (HIGH, MODERATE, LOW, VERY LOW) so a Tier A source whose verbatim only loosely supports a specific claim is not silently treated as if it carried HIGH evidence. Both axes appear on every audit entry. The evidence-strength framework is documented in full in the methodology.

Corrections policy

If we get something wrong, we want to hear about it. Email [email protected] with the URL and a specific correction. Our process when a correction is flagged:

1. We acknowledge the email within two business days.
2. We verify the claim against the original source.
3. If we were wrong, we update the article within five business days and add a dated correction note in the audit entry's history field.
4. If the error was material (affecting a payment figure, a rate comparison, or a legal claim), we surface the correction on the homepage for seven days and on the corrections log permanently.
5. If we disagree with the flagged correction, we reply explaining why.

We do not silently edit articles. Substantive changes are logged. The full chronological record is published at /corrections and is generated mechanically from the per-claim history fields in the audit; no entry is hand-curated and no entry is removable from the public record.

Update cycle

Claims tagged cycle_dependent: true in the audit are reviewed every 60 to 90 days, anchored to a named event (typically a Bank of Canada rate decision, a quarterly CMHC report release, or a regulator's announced publication cycle). As of the most recent audit pass, 21 claims carry the cycle-dependent flag. Stale cycle-dependent claims are surfaced in the build output before any deploy and are queued for manual re-verification.

The audit's daily Wayback retry sweep, the 90-day stale check on every claim's last_verified date, and the cycle-dependent TTLs are all enforced mechanically by the deploy gate. The full update-cadence schedule (monthly for rate-environment statements, quarterly for CMHC and OSFI portfolio data, event-driven for regulator updates, six-monthly for lender Standard Charge Terms, annual for evergreen statutes) is published in the methodology.

Calculator methodology

Our calculators (payment shock, switch cost, IRD penalty, renewal letter decoder) use standard Canadian mortgage amortisation mathematics: semi-annual compounding, not in advance, per section 6 of the federal Interest Act for fixed-rate mortgages. Inputs are entered by the user and all computation happens in the browser. We do not transmit, log, or store the figures you enter.

Every calculator's formula is recorded as a type: math entry in the audit and is enforced by the CALCULATOR-PARITY detector, which runs the live calculator with the recorded inputs and asserts the recorded result on every deploy. Computational errors therefore surface as a deploy-gate failure before they can reach a reader.

AI and automation

We use software tools, including AI assistants, for research, drafting support, and editorial workflows. We do not publish AI-generated content without human editorial review, fact-checking, and primary-source verification. Synthesis claims that combine multiple sources show the inference chain in the audit; we do not pass off model output as a verbatim. The deploy gate's NO-META-NARRATION detector blocks any audit entry whose source quote begins with editor commentary rather than literal source text.

Editor and publisher

Editor: Omar M.S. Hamed.
Publisher: O.MS.H Media Inc., Federal corporation #1589366-6, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Contact: [email protected].

Last updated: May 5, 2026. Schema version 1.0.