Thank you, Chair.
Welcome, everyone. You'll have to excuse the delay because of the vote. It seems to happen here once we start session, but thank you for your safe travels here.
I've been spending quite a bit of time reading all the material related to the housing market in Canada. It's a daily topic for my constituents. We get emails on.... The latest email I received was from an individual who wanted to buy a house in Waterloo for his daughter. The listed price of the house was $379,000, and it went for $500,000.
Closer to home, when I see houses selling in our subdivision for $1.4 million or $1.5 million, I kind of scratch my head when those houses were originally listed in 2007 for about $480,000. There is something going on, whether it's the supply or demand side that we need to look at.
When I look at all the changes that have taken place within the Canadian housing market, the price increases, the flow of the demographic slide, the flow of immigrants, newcomers, and Canadian citizens moving to the GTA, for example, the area that I reside in, there are a lot of natural outcomes. One of the outcomes has been a very large increase in indebtedness of individuals. It behooves any government, including my colleagues on the other side when they were in power, to make sure that changes are made to ensure the system does not go off-kilter, that we do not experience something akin to what happened in the United States.
In Canada, we have a very unique system where the government backstops a large portion of the market, i.e. the high-ratio portion or what's called less than 20% down payment. Going through all the changes that have been made, some of them are quite prudent. There's a structure in place in the housing market on mortgage generation, which were changes that were made, and I would argue that a lot of the changes are actually quite prudent and that we also have to incorporate regional differences.
My question is coming from the Bank of Canada's FSR report in December. Looking at the increase of indebtedness levels, I can turn to page 5 of the report. It says, “The proportion of borrowers with high mortgage debt is increasing in many cities”.
Looking at the trends, isn't it prudent for any government, when CMHC is effectively backstopped by the taxpayers of Canada, to implement measures designed to improve the quality of indebtedness for borrowers going forward?
I'll put that out there because I think it is prudent for any government, be it on the Liberal side or in the past on the Conservative side. Would you take 30 seconds each to answer that, please?