Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses who are here today.
As a Carleton University alumnus, I feel outnumbered here this morning. Nevertheless, I will try to proceed to maximize my time here.
I want to pick up on what you said there, Mr. Kabalen, about the CMHC. Please be harsh on them. They deserve that, I think, frankly, for the service standards that we have seen from them in the last couple of years. We hear endlessly about where there are dollars here for programs, and they're flowing through either not at all or not in a timely manner.
I'll go to Dr. Summerby-Murray. I take the point on affordable housing. I appreciate the suggestion on the expansion of eligibility.
The other part, I think, builds on exactly what needs to be repeated by partners over and over again, and I'll go to that fund you specifically mentioned on the housing accelerator fund. That was announced in December 2021 to accelerate housing being built in every part of this country. Not one single unit has been completed in this country, two years later.
I've always said as well, on advocacy, that it's A for an announcement about programs all the time, and availability and funds, and then an F for follow-through, for actually going through. Eligibility is a problem, but it's the actual follow-through. You could do the same thing for converting federal buildings. There has been a commitment for the past eight years to convert some of the 37,000 federal buildings we have, with 6 million square metres of space and land available. We asked the question: In the last eight years, how many have been converted and new homes built as part of that priority? It's 13. It's not 13 in Halifax or 13 in Nova Scotia. It's 13 in the entire country over eight years. Again, I think the delivering aspect of this is equally important on a lot of these programs.
Could I ask this on trying to quantify some of the numbers? You've mentioned the percentage of units that are available on campus or by the university. Are you trying now to follow up to quantify the number of people who are in precarious housing and perhaps what they're actually paying? I believe that students are probably paying even more than the average doubling of rent in this crunch situation that we have. Are you going to be providing any data or looking at that data in the network that you have?