Total profits for Canada's six biggest banks surged to $5.3 billion in the first quarter as loan losses fell and their domestic operations flourished.

Those profits are about 75 per cent higher than they were in the first quarter last year, when the world financial meltdown was in full swing.

All six banks posted much higher Q1 profits this year.

Bank earnings - Q1 2010
Bank Q1 profit Change from year ago
Bank of Nova Scotia $988 million +17%
CIBC $652 million +343%
Bank of Montreal $657 million +192%
National Bank $215 million +211%
Royal Bank $1.5 billion +35%
TD Bank $1.29 billion +98%

Scotiabank became the latest of the big banks to report its earnings Tuesday and, as with most of Canada's chartered banks, those profits came in better than expected.

Scotiabank said it made $988 million in the quarter ended Jan. 31. That was 17 per cent ahead of its profit in Q1 last year.

That works out to 93 cents a share on a cash basis. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected profit would come in at 88 cents a share.

Total revenues rose 16 per cent to $3.98 billion.

Scotiabank is known as the most international of Canada's big banks. Yet it was its Canadian retail operations that were responsible for most of its profit this quarter, with a record net income of $560 million — up 28 per cent from last year.

"This quarter's results benefited from growth in mortgages, lines of credit and personal deposits — in particular our high-interest savings and chequing accounts," Scotiabank CEO Rick Waugh said in a release.

"We are still in the early days of the recovery and we continue to carefully manage our businesses in order to achieve solid earnings and maintain a strong return on equity," he said.

Some analysts share the need for banks to be cautious in the current environment.

"Yes, the economy is all right, but a lot can happen in the next three quarters," said Brenda Lum, managing director of financial institutions at the DBRS credit rating agency.

"We are optimistic in the sense that we've seen (loan-loss) provisioning peak, and that's reflected in the results of the first quarter," she said.

Scotiabank was the last of the big six banks to report Q1 earnings. In every case but one, the results were better than analysts had been expecting. Only the Royal Bank missed expectations.

Total compensation packages for the six bank CEOs came to $49.75 million in 2009, led by pay packets of just over $10 million each for TD's and Royal Bank's chief executives. The total compensation amounted to an average increase of 10 per cent.

With files from The Canadian Press