Should monetary policy use its short-term policy rate to stabilize the growth in household credit and housing prices with the aim of promoting financial stability? We ask this question for the case of Canada. We find that to a first approximation, the answer is no especially when the economy is slowing down. The global financial crisis has reignited the debate on whether a central bank should pay special attention to asset prices and credit aggregates. Indeed, the benign neglect approach of the mid-2000s seems to have been debunked by what we know today of the by subsequent events. This opens the door to a leaning against the-wind (LAW) approach to monetary policy, a policy where the policy stance is chosen to be tighter than the one justied by the stabilization and resource utilization (traditional central banks’ goals) to limit the buildup of financial risks. Proponents of LAW argue that even though the policy rate may not be the best tool to deal with financial risks, especially when compared to micro-and macro-prudential tools it has the advantage of getting in all of the cracks(BIS 2014, Stein 2013, 2014). On the other side of the camp, Svensson (2014, 2015;2016) argues that, for the case of Sweden, the benefits of a tighter-than-otherwise policy are dwarfed by their costs; Ajello et al. (2015) nd that financial stability considerations are not quantitatively relevant to meaningfully alter the usual conduct of monetary policy. Falling somewhere in the middle, IMF (2015) stresses that country matter substantially to correctly assess costs and benefits of alternative monetary policy paths, setting the bar high to lean against the wind but leaving the door open to the possibility of finding circumstances where benefits outweigh costs. In this paper, we assess the relative welfare benefits of LAW in Canada. At the current conjuncture, Canada represents an interesting case: Monetary policy faces the dilemma of supporting a struggling economy by cutting interest rates and maintaining financial stability in the context of high household debt and ever-growing housing prices.