I'll take a shot at that.
I totally understand. We have some world-class, vibrant, global cities in Canada. Compared to other world-class, vibrant cities, they're still not very expensive. I think this is something we have to reconcile. How do people of the second generation in Paris or London afford to live there? Because they certainly aren't buying houses of the sort you're describing. People adapt and they live differently. In the case we have here, we have a big country and people move somewhere else. In a digital economy, they can be in all kinds of different places and be very productive.
We don't know how all this is going to turn out. People of our age have a culture where we buy our house and we have our mortgage and we pay it off. Someday you're debt-free. Other people in other societies choose to rent their entire lives. We say, “Well, it's too bad they're not owning a home,” but they may rent exactly the same place that whole time. If you have a large debt and you're just servicing that debt your whole life and you never actually own the place, you're just paying rent to someone else. You're paying rent to a bank instead of to someone who owns the apartment.
Many of these models may look the same, but the finances are just different. We have a very innovative financial sector that I think can manage it for people. I don't like to pre-judge it as a problem, per se. The best contribution we can make to affordability is to keep inflation under control. Part of that is getting interest rates back to normal so that we don't have 20% or 30% price hikes in a market like Vancouver, which was for sure destroying affordability.