I'll be brief.
My colleague referred to restrictions on supply in the hottest markets, and I think we can't have a discussion about housing affordability without talking about the matter of supply.
In my remarks I talked about trade-offs. I don't mean to sound like an economist, but public policy is a matter of trade-offs, and at present we have provincial and local governments constraining supply to achieve environmental goals or other policy objectives, but they're doing so at the expense of housing affordability.
Here in Toronto, the construction of single-family detached homes is at the lowest level in 36 years. In the city of Vancouver the construction of single-family detached homes has been flat for a quarter of a century.
I think we need to have a serious public policy debate in this country about these trade-offs. That's not to say that green space and other policy objectives aren't justified, but they do conflict with other objectives, including the priority in the current Ottawa government's focus on inclusive growth and middle-class opportunity, which as we know is closely associated with home ownership.
At the Macdonald-Laurier Institute we've even talked of Ottawa taking the extraordinary step—which I suspect would displease provincial and local governments—of tying affordable housing dollars to the city governments' revisiting of some of these urban containment strategies. Until we get at this matter of supply, the types of announcements that the minister made, which focus on demand, are going to have minimal impact, without broader thinking about the role of supply.