Thank you. I very much appreciate those university connections in the room. Thank you so much.
Yes, there certainly are challenges across our region in Atlantic Canada. I can speak for Saint Mary's University, where we maintained a wait-list on our residence but cleared it Labour Day weekend. We housed all of our students. What we don't know is the number of our students who are in what I would describe as “precarious housing” situations. We run at about 18% of our population in residence, but the remaining 82% are in local areas, and that's where much of the challenge is.
Certainly, across our region, we have students who have deferred the university experience. They cannot come to Halifax, Sydney, Moncton, Fredericton, Saint John or Charlottetown because of the lack of housing. It's a key issue for us as we go forward.
The highlighted challenge, of course, also has been related to international students who come to our region, often with less access to housing at the beginning and less familiarity with landlord-tenant relationships. We have programs to address this, but that remains a big challenge for us.
The primary drivers of the shortfall, I'd suggest, are the increased pressures on our local markets for housing that have come simply from immigration itself. There's a good-news-bad-news story there as we bring population in. Certainly, I've had colleagues from the federal government say that we need more people to build the houses but we need the houses to accommodate the additional people.... That vicious circle is one that we need to break going forward.
Certainly, from the university's perspective, access to federal support for long-term capital, including working with private developers, would be very important for us by way of a solution going forward.