Canadian Exceptionism
Canada is one of the few countries without a major banking crisis. Weirdly, this was also true in 1930. I've seen this list of the success factors for Canadian banks in several places. I want to believe it, but . . .
..it doesn't seem to be as simple as "Canadian banks are more tightly-regulated".
I don't find "they were more tightly regulated" a plausible explanation. When you dig down, most of those explanations seem short on the actual regulations that accomplished this marvelous feat, or even an extraordinary risk management system, and long on glowering regulators putting the fear of God into snivelling bankers through sheer force of moral righteousness. But more importantly, the banking crisis seems to be hitting almost every other country very hard even though they have very different bank regulators.
The standard liberal response is that all of those regulators were in the grip of Anglo-saxon free market mania. Maybe. This Anglo-Saxon mania seems awfully broadly distributed, into countries that don't show much sign of it in other sectors of their economy. More importantly, even if all of these countries had banking systems that were equally unregulated by some metaphysical metric divinable only by contributors to Crooked Timber, they were differently unregulated. Yet countries with very different (assuming arguendo, all bad) regulatory systems were all hard hit.
But I don't find this list all that plausible either. 1-4 also describes Britain, indeed, much of Europe. And the last item describes America--it's just people found cute ways to get around the insurance requirement with piggyback loans.
I hate to say it, but the best explanation I've heard comes from Canadian bankers, and people who have worked in/with Canadian banking. It's that the Canadian bankers are, well, Canadian. They're very conservative. And they don't trust easy money.