Thanks for all of your help.
My RRSP's are all in equities due to the fact that I am young and I like taking risk. Based on what I read, I'm going to leave them where they are and just put a smaller downpayment towards the purchase as I don't wanna get rid of equities that Ive purchased at lower costs (I've made some substantial gains since the markets have "picked up" over the past 6 or so months)
I used the HBP to buy my first, house, over a decade ago now. It didn't work the way you are describing it though. I didn't actually "cash out" my existing RSP holdings. The plan allowed me to use all of the unused portion of my RRSP contributions for the past xx years via a 90-day government loan. It was as if, in that year, I contributed an extra $17K to my RRSP, thus getting a bigger tax refund. That tax refund was applied to my downpayment. In my case, the transaction had to take place in the spring, to line up with income tax filing dates.
So pretend you were able to contribute $5K a year but you only contributed $3K for the past 10 years. You have $20K that the gov't loans you for 90 days. You deposit that $20K in your RRSP account (I made $350 on that part of the transaction), then withdraw it after the 90 days and give it back to the gov't. You can now use that $20K to earn a larger income tax refund, which is applied to your down payment.
I don't know if that program is still in existence, or if the HBP is now simply a straight withdrawl of existing RSP holdings. If that's the case, you have to crunch the numbers to see what you would be losing in terms of gains, over the time frame it would take you to repay the loan. You might make more money in the market than by investing in a home. But, it might help people who otherwise could not afford a house, buy one. I likely would not have withdrawn from my RSP's. Others might. I think that if you are not risk adverse, as you say, you're better off skipping the program.