Celebrating Canada’s 2026 Mortgage Hall of Fame inductees
Three longtime leaders in Canada’s mortgage industry were celebrated Monday evening as they were inducted into the Canadian Mortgage Hall of Fame during Mortgage Professionals Canada’s National Mortgage Conference in Calgary.
This year’s inductees — Paul Bruce, Sabeena Bubber and Veronica Love — have each made their mark on the industry through leadership, innovation and a commitment to helping others. Their careers span different corners of the mortgage sector, but all three share a dedication to strengthening the industry and supporting the people within it.
Meet the 2026 Hall of Fame inductees
Paul Bruce
Building a career on relationships, complexity and growth
It’s rare to find someone who has spent their entire career working for the same organization these days, but Paul Bruce, executive vice-president of single-family residential at MCAP, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
“I’m fortunate that I get to work with my best friends, and it’s a ton of fun,” he says. “They’re some of the smartest people in this space in Canada, and I love the fact that we debate the issues, we don’t debate each other; there’s a lot of mutual respect.”
Over his nearly 35-year career — spanning different names and iterations of the same organization — Bruce says there have been plenty of issues to debate as the industry has evolved. Solving complex puzzles with lots of moving pieces, however, is what Bruce enjoys most about his career.
“It’s a big, complicated system, from how we assemble land to how we build homes to how we do the construction financing, and ultimately to the mortgage financing for the homeowner,” he says. “What further exacerbates everything is dealing with capital markets and how all the funding structures work behind the scenes for us to fund homeowners, so it’s a very big, complicated, wide system, and no one should be embarrassed that they don’t know it all.”
Bruce notes that the industry has evolved quite a lot since he first joined Mutual Life of Canada in his hometown of Waterloo as a student at nearby Wilfrid Laurier University. At the time, he says he was just happy to find a summer job in a challenging economy, but quickly found a home for himself in the mortgage space, especially after moving to Toronto in 1995.
Since then, Bruce says the proportion of Canadian homeowners who choose to work with a broker has nearly doubled, which he credits in part to the growing complexity of mortgage products.
“The complexities come from regulation in the marketplace, and for people to navigate that regulation they need a mortgage professional to help,” Bruce says. “Then we watched the evolution of the products — like home equity products and HELOCs — so we’ve also seen changes on the product side.”
Further contributing to the complexity is the evolution of technology, which has increased the pace of everything from approvals to rate changes.
However, Bruce says there is no challenge he enjoys more than helping MCAP expand through mergers and acquisitions, having assisted with many such transactions during his tenure.
“The biggest, most interesting challenge people would naturally think are the system, the products, the programs, but it’s actually merging the cultures of companies,” he says. “We’ve done that successfully, but many M&As fail because they don’t operate a great culture. We were aware of that early on, and we designed and strategized different things to avoid the pitfalls.”
Despite his induction into the Mortgage Hall of Fame, Bruce says he doesn’t plan on slowing down anytime soon.
“There’s definitely more growth available for MCAP, and it’s not just organic growth,” he says. “I do think there’s potentially going to be some more M&A opportunities coming up, and I’d love to work on one or two more if they come to fruition.”
In the meantime, Bruce says he’s humbled and honoured to join the Hall of Fame alongside fellow industry heavyweights, including two of his MCAP colleagues.
“One was Ric McGratten, a retired president at MCAP, and the other is Ron Swift, who’s still active in the business today and remains a very good friend and client,” he says. “Just being in the company of them and the others in the Hall of Fame is a huge honour.”
Sabeena Bubber
Turning personal adversity into a legacy of giving back
Sabeena Bubber’s professional life has been shaped by personal challenges, but with each setback, she’s found new ways to grow her business and help others facing difficult circumstances.
After graduating from the University of Regina with a Bachelor of Commerce degree and landing her first job as an assistant branch manager at a finance company, Bubber went on to work as an underwriter with a private lender. “I was working extraordinary hours, and some of the brokers were like, ‘you’re working on the wrong side of the desk. You should be a broker,’” Bubber recalls.
In 2001, Bubber began the licensing process and took a job with RBC, where she quickly excelled but felt something was lacking in her client relationships. That ultimately inspired her to strike out on her own in 2005.
“I was a raging workaholic — that is how I built my business,” Bubber says. “I was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day. When I had kids, I had to dial it back a little bit, and I worked less on weekends, but still worked very long days.”
In those days, Bubber kept a list of goals, which included some of the industry’s top honours and accolades, such as being inducted into the Canadian Mortgage Hall of Fame. Those aspirations, however, were largely abandoned a decade ago as Bubber faced a series of personal hardships.
“I left my marriage in 2016, and at the same time my friend lost a child in an accident,” she says. “Her daughter drowned off Gambier Island when she was on a weekend visit with her dad. They also never found his body.”
In the wake of the tragedy, Bubber appealed to her colleagues in the mortgage industry to help support her friend who was struggling financially while facing an unimaginable loss.
“I started a GoFundMe page, and $7,000 of that money came from the mortgage brokerage community — from people across Canada that didn’t even know this woman but just heard the story that I was telling online,” she says. “That’s where Brokers Who Care was born.”
As of this writing, 234 Canadian mortgage professionals have donated more than half a million dollars to 79 causes through the online community group.
As she was building the platform, Bubber was also navigating a challenging, three-year-long divorce, during which she learned some difficult lessons.
“I decided to start The Divorce Circle because there were so many layers of divorce that people don’t understand when it comes to mortgages, investments, finance, legal processes, how not to spend a fortune on lawyers, all those things,” Bubber says.
The Divorce Circle began as an in-person seminar, then moved online during the pandemic, before evolving into a podcast series last year.
“I was a single parent, running my business, going through a divorce, then the pandemic happened, and it was just a lot of stuff happening during that time period,” Bubber says. “Then in 2022 I was diagnosed with breast cancer.”
At first Bubber hid her diagnosis, afraid of the impact it might have on her business.
“I went to my social media people and said we need to build out content for a year, because you’re not going to get any new pictures of me,” she says. “I had to go through that alone because I didn’t want anybody to know I was sick.”
When she returned from treatment a year later, her once-long black hair was now short and white, prompting her to reveal her diagnosis to colleagues and friends in the industry. Had it not been for the new hairstyle, Bubber doubts she would have told anyone.
“When I was on my breast cancer journey, I had a lot of time to think, because I wasn’t working,” she says. “It’s like, what is this here to teach me, and what do I want instead of what I have now? What am I going to create next?”
Bubber says the experience completely changed her outlook on life, and her priorities. Since then, she’s been spending more time with her two daughters, travelling and building The Divorce Circle and Brokers Who Care, while seeking more opportunities to educate others in the industry. “I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, I’m happier than I’ve ever been, my business is thriving, and the podcast has gotten huge,” she says.
As Bubber shifted her priorities away from business and towards her family and personal life, the awards she once coveted began rolling in.
In 2024 and 2025, she was named one of Canada’s Top 75 Mortgage Brokers; in 2025, she was named Canadian Mortgage Broker of the Year. Now, Bubber can cross the biggest item off the list she threw out years ago: induction into the Canadian Mortgage Hall of Fame.
“I was having dinner with somebody in the industry in Madrid with my daughter, and I couldn’t think of a better time to get that news, with my daughter present,” Bubber says. “She cried, I cried, and we had a moment. We had to get up from the table and embrace, because me and my kids, we’d been through a lot together.”
Earning the industry’s highest distinction means a lot to Bubber, but not as much as the opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the lives of those facing challenges like those she’s had to overcome.
“What’s most rewarding to me is when I have somebody say to me, ‘what you did really helped me,’” Bubber says. “That’s why I’m here, to make a contribution. That’s my legacy.”
Veronica Love
Championing women, education and change in the mortgage industry
Whether she’s rappelling down city hall to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, shining a light on gender discrimination in the industry, or expanding educational opportunities for mortgage professionals, Veronica Love is always looking for ways to give back.
After earning a communications diploma from Humber College, Love began her career supporting non-profits in the health sector, including the Lung Association, the Canadian Diabetes Association, the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation and MLSE’s The Leafs Fund.
After demonstrating her event-planning skills, Love was recruited by Royal LePage to run its industry conferences in 2002, despite having no prior experience in the real estate sector.
“I never thought I would be an event planner — that was never the goal — but I was really good at it,” she says. “I just always wanted something bigger.”
That opportunity came after Royal LePage franchise owner Chris Kayat left to start Dominion Lending Centres and asked Love to join him as an event planner.
“I said, ‘Okay, I’m interested, but I’m not just interested in doing events,’” Love recalls. “’I’ll do your events, but I also want to do franchise relations.’ We negotiated a dual role, and that’s how I joined Dominion Lending Centres back in 2010.”
After five years at DLC, Love was recruited by MERIX Financial in 2015 and later joined TMG The Mortgage Group in 2019. In early 2025, Love was promoted to chief revenue officer and became president of TMG Enterprise Partners earlier this year. Love’s contributions to the industry, however, extend well beyond her day job.
Love also served as a volunteer, fundraiser and committee member for the Make-A-Wish Rope for Hope event, launched a private Facebook group called Underwriting Tips while at MERIX to help educate brokers, and has been heavily involved in the Women in the Mortgage Industry (WIMI) community, which named her the first WIMI of the Year in 2016.
In 2015, Love joined the Independent Mortgage Brokers’ Association (IMBA) of Ontario as executive director of member relations and became a director on Mortgage Professionals Canada’s board in 2020. While MPC board members typically serve for three years before campaigning for a seat on the executive board, Love applied in just her second year.
“I got told by a few people to mind my P’s and Q’s, and that wasn’t the right step, but I couldn’t find any bylaws that said anything about excelling that quickly,” she says. “I was like, ‘no, I don’t have time for that. I’m going to fast track this.’”
After successfully campaigning for vice-chair in just her second year with MPC, Love became chair in 2022, during which time she worked to modernize the organization’s mortgage professional designation program.
“What I’m really proud about is making it a little bit more accessible for a busy agent or a busy lender,” she says. “I divided it into four modules with tests after each module, rather than one giant test at the end, so that people can say I’m working towards my AMPC designation, rather than just having to announce it when they accomplish the whole thing.”
Love, however, believes her greatest contributions to the industry have come through her tireless efforts to support women in the mortgage sector. She explains that when she began organizing industry events in 2010, she couldn’t help but notice the lack of female representation on stage and in senior leadership.
“And then all of a sudden, I started to hear women say that they didn’t feel safe coming to events anymore,” she says. “They were being harassed or spoken to inappropriately — some of them were even put in harm’s way — and I became very vocal on this issue.”
In 2021, Love, alongside the late Christine Buemann Pam Pikkert, and others, appeared on the Brokers Helping Brokers podcast to share deeply personal stories of sexual harassment in the mortgage sector.
“It was the start of a #MeToo movement in our industry, where we spoke openly and candidly about how we needed to change the way our events function so that all people feel safe to attend,” says Love. “Women should never miss out on a cocktail party or a golf tournament because they don’t feel safe.”
In the ensuing weeks, multiple lenders, brokerages and MPC began offering bystander training and introducing new event safety measures, including reporting booths and walk-home programs.
“I’m really proud of the industry for rallying around this, but I’m also proud of myself for not shying away from that conversation,” Love says. “As a result, women feel more confident going to events, and when you look at the stage, we have a much bigger female presence.”
Love’s willingness to go the extra mile both in her day job and in volunteer roles has taken her far in the mortgage sector, and with each step she’s found ways to bring other women along with her.
While she’s honoured to take that next step into the Canadian Mortgage Hall of Fame, Love feels like her career still has a long path ahead.
“I think that’s why it shocked me a little bit to be nominated and inducted, because I do feel like I have so much more to give,” she says, pointing to the recent launch of TMG Enterprise Partners, where she serves as president. “I’m very humbled to be inducted.”
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Last modified: October 20, 2026
