The question, as I understand it, is how can we get all these benefits from a session that only costs $450 million--and as a deferral at that? The answer is that people are operating at the margin. In other words, there's a decision on whether to sell or not. When they sell, someone else buys the property, comes with new eyes to the property, and decides to improve it. So you get these improvements and avoid absentee ownership.
We are not saying that the $450 million in deferral costs would generate $1 billion in revenue through these other mechanisms, but we are saying that all these other mechanisms are at work.
If one wanted to improve the affordability of housing dramatically, one would have to bring in other measures besides this $450-million deferral. But $450 million less tax paid out of maybe $4 billion total is 10%. It matters to owners. So there would be an impact on housing affordability.
Many of these other impacts are because people are incented to do something differently, and different outcomes happen. For example, on the question of environmentally sound urban redevelopment, we're not going to have every city in Canada all of a sudden blossom into wonderful new developments. But at the margin there are blocks that cannot be developed because the owners will not sell because they're locked in. Some of those blocks will sell, and there will be some of those developments.