Thank you very much.
I was in the midst of giving an energized Zoom experience, talking about how government efforts to pick the low-hanging fruit on housing affordability had proven to have limited lasting influence to dampen down home prices or close the frightening gap between home values and what locals are earning in our cities.
That's why the lab you've asked us to come to talk about is aiming to dig deeper, to move beyond the low-hanging fruit to focus on a more disturbing root cause of the problem: the reality that many everyday Canadians, myself included, are entangled in perpetuating our unsustainable, unaffordable housing system because public policies incline us to organize our wealth strategy in ways that count on home prices rising faster than earnings.
We've organized the lab in this way because we observe that the current national housing strategy, as important as it is, suffers a major omission: Never once does this strategy mention the word “wealth”. By failing to acknowledge wealth, the strategy risks overlooking that a primary reason our country is struggling to restore housing affordability is that few Canadians think rising home prices are uniformly bad. It's quite the opposite. Many regular folks benefit.
It's the good and the bad of rising home prices, then, that are the focus of our lab, along with the competing interests or tensions they create. Our lab has aimed to service those tensions and to service in particular the policy drivers that give rise to them, because those policy drivers hold unique potential to redesign the Canadian housing system in search of win-wins wherever possible, or a better balance of competing interests when win-wins are not in reach.
I look forward to your questions.