Thank you for the question, Mr. Brison.
I'd make two distinctions. First, the bank's expectation with respect to economic growth has been that activity in the broad housing sector, meaning housing starts, renovations, and housing sales and the commissions that come from those, would decline markedly starting in the second quarter of this year and continuing over the course of this year. That is what we've seen: the level of activity that we've seen in the housing market has been consistent with our expectations. This has been a function of basically a concentration of housing activity through last year and the start of this year, because of pulled-forward demand because of the HST coming into place, pent-up demand because of the recession, obviously, and also the positive impact of the home renovation tax credit. So there's been that concentration. Now we see there's a decline markedly.
On the separate issue of the levels of valuations of housing, I would say that our expectation is that housing price appreciation and the net worth accumulation associated with the house price appreciation over much of this past decade has provided stimulus to consumption, and we do not expect that such stimulus will be there over our projection horizon.