Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thanks to our guests for being here today.
I come from northern Alberta, where the Town of Valleyview is building a new town hall or office building. It's net zero, and they're really excited about that. However, if you go just down the highway to Fox Creek, 10,000 people sleep in Fox Creek every night, and yet they cannot.... They have to bus in people to work in the hotels. They bus people in to work at the gas station. They bus people in to work at Subway. It's a common problem.
If you build a house in Fox Creek and you follow all the guidelines—the building code, the zoning requirements, and everything like that—you cannot produce a house for less that $350,000 in Fox Creek. The people who are working at Subway don't make enough money to be able to pay for that house. That's a frustration of mine. The mayor says, “How do I attract people to come and move to my town?” I say, “You have endless forests in any direction. Give them an acre of land and tell them that as long as the sewage doesn't land on their neighbour, they'll be okay.”
The zoning restrictions and the building code and all of this just make the houses so expensive. How do we bring that down? I want to hear a little bit more about that sweet spot thing you were talking about in terms of how we get there.