TORONTO (Reuters) - A post-crisis boom in sales of Canadian corporate bonds looks set to extend into 2011, delighting fee-hungry bankers and companies looking to lock in borrowing costs near historic lows.

Debt market watchers say high demand from income-seeking investors is behind the surge, as are interest and inflation rates that are expected to stay low for a long time.

"The growth will continue certainly. There's two sides to the equation, the investors and the issuers, and I think that investors have shown no sign of slowing down. Their appetite for new issue continues to be very strong," said John Tkach, head of Canadian debt capital markets at Scotia Capital.

Companies have raised C$67.2 billion ($65.9 billion) in the corporate debt market this year, topping the full-year totals for 2008 and 2009, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Even if companies sold no more debt, 2010 would be the second best year on record, after 2007's C$74.1 billion.

The reasons are plentiful. Bond yields have dropped sharply since the start of the year as the Canadian and US recoveries faltered. Canada's 10-year government bond yield hit a 2010 low below 2.7 percent last month.

The Federal Reserve's decision to effectively print money to buy more bonds has helped Canada's bond market, amid broad expectations the Bank of Canada rate increases are over for now.

Investors, fearful of the gut-wrenching stock market falls seen during the worst of the financial crisis in late 2008, have clung to the relative safety of bonds.

"We're seeing a lot of inflows into fixed-income products, yield-oriented products, and we're not seeing those inflows into equity products," said Terry Carr, head of Canadian fixed income for MFC Global Investment Management, a unit of Manulife Financial Corp.