You bring up a good point, the idea that all housing is local, and there are conditions in various markets across the country. On the recent moves, I'll wait to see whether or not they're successful, but I think we needed to do something. We needed to bring in some measures.
I don't see a problem with bringing out measures that are specifically oriented toward particular regions: Ontario, Toronto. You can certainly go through and bring up measures that don't necessarily specifically target, but if you look at financial conditions—the condition of the market you're thinking about borrowing in—putting in thresholds that are somewhat higher than the rest of the country makes sense. It turns out to be a specific focus on a region, but I think they're appropriate, given that you want to target sections that are showing clear imbalances, which Toronto and Vancouver are.
We want to certainly get into the idea, in this environment right now, of being careful about encouraging people to go into the housing market, especially in Toronto and Vancouver. Those are markets where we have restrictions on supply, and we have a lot of immigrants and other people who are still coming into the market. We don't necessarily want to encourage people to buy into these markets that are overvalued. We certainly want to get people thinking more rationally in terms of household borrowing.
I'd go back to 2009. In 2009, when we were coming out of the financial crisis and the recession, it was appropriate at that point to bring in the home renovation tax credit. Households were not over-leveraged. Household investment in residential real estate had fallen quite sharply. We are not in that environment right now. We do not need measures that would encourage people to go into the housing market.
The way I usually have been talking to people in general is that what we need now is to recognize that there's an imbalance between renting and owning. Right now the costs definitely favour renting, so I think that right now we should avoid specific measures to encourage people to get into home ownership until we get the valuation structure under better control.
Again, I still support measures to make housing more affordable, but we have to do it in the context of where we are, starting right now.