First of all, the reason I spent most of my remarks talking about Reaching Home or the homelessness strategy is that this is community led. The federal government identifies organizations across the country and gives them a block of funding to respond to the crisis of homelessness.
I would suggest that we do the same to facilitate not-for-profits in rapidly developing affordable housing that can stay that way forever. You pay for it once with us and then you're done. We're not coming back every time for additional subsidies. It's not a set term, like the other agreements that exist with the private sector. When a coinvestment loan expires with a private developer, after 10 or 20 years they can up the rent. We're not interested in doing that. We want to maintain forever affordable housing. Our challenges are that we don't have the capital; we rely on the government programs, and the timelines are too long. They'll always be too long when we're competing with the private sector for the same opportunities and they want to demolish the naturally occurring affordable housing or build higher-end or more expensive housing.
We're losing our competitive advantage. We didn't pay HST for a long time. It's great that the federal government...and the provincial government in Nova Scotia followed and extended that to the private sector. However, it's another loss for the not-for-profit sector. We've never paid the HST. We could compete with the private sector and use that as our equity, in a sense.
I think the new competitive advantage needs to be unencumbered capital and more grants in the coinvestment program as opposed to loans in the coinvestment program. I would design it as we've designed Reaching Home, which, as we've demonstrated, is successful. If you were to give us a block of funding, we could go out and buy buildings with that block of funding. Those programs are well overseen by good civil servants at Infrastructure Canada. They're smart. They know what they're doing. They don't have to mitigate the same risks that the civil servants at CMHC do, because they're taking that risk themselves.
I think there's an opportunity there to create more community-led initiatives around affordable housing supply and affordable housing investment by the not-for-profit sector. That would be one thing to take away that would actually cost you less, probably, because you wouldn't need all the underwriters to oversee these deals.