As Ratings Shopping Takes Off, Morningstar Dominates Canada

For years, one credit-ratings firm has handed out the most favorable grades to corporate borrowers in the Canadian bond market: Morningstar DBRS. On average, its ratings are one full notch higher than those assigned by S&P Global Ratings, Moody’s Ratings and Fitch Ratings.

So when companies, eager to cut costs, suddenly started issuing a raft of bonds with only a single credit rating — instead of the two or three that had long been the norm — the firm they tapped, time and again, to assign them was DBRS. There were 111 such deals in 2025, more than the total from the previous two years combined, and several more in January. DBRS handled more than 80% of them, data compiled by Bloomberg show.