Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to all of you for being here.
I want to speak to you, Mr. Morrison, because you spoke about social housing and the housing strategy. Often when we're studying these impacts, those low-income earners are a somewhat different issue. One issue is about getting into the market, but the other is about anything that's somewhat affordable and just being able to get there.
I wanted to talk a bit about some of the things you raised. This is of particular interest to me because I tried to fight for a lot of these things when I was in municipal government, but there are a lot of barriers. You mentioned three things in particular that the federal government could do or should do to help. In listening to all three of those, I saw that you still need the provincial and municipal governments, even if, as you proposed, there are federal aspects in the use of social housing. Unless you build only social housing in that area, or if you build only social housing on those lands, that actually goes against a lot of provincial and municipal ideas. One that I hold personally is that you don't build social housing in one area; the community needs to be fully integrated.
The second issue is that you have the municipal and the provincial governments, and if you allocate certain land or certain units to be affordable, how do you ensure.... First of all, our definitions of affordable are very different. I know that in Ontario from the municipal side our definition of “affordable” is way off kilter. Also, then, what do you do if you actually have an affordable unit?
Let's say the federal government makes some recommendations, you have an affordable unit, and that person sells. That's now on the open market. How do you not lose those affordable units? What regulation or legislation would you like to see? Even though the federal government can impose on other tiers of government in terms of housing, they must necessarily deal with this. How would we work with other levels to ensure that it trickles all the way down and we keep those affordable units?