Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for inviting us here today.
We recently met with many of you during our annual PAC days, political action committee days, and we have a brief here that I can leave with a few recommendations.
I want to speak broadly about where we are in terms of the housing crisis and some of our thoughts on how to find our way out of it.
First of all, I think it's really important that people recognize that we are in a housing crisis and that it's a housing crisis that affects every single Canadian right across the housing spectrum.
Steve was talking about home ownership. People still desire home ownership. A few years ago, we did a lot of studies of millennials that I think shattered a lot of myths. We found that millennials were not prepared to live in apartments and eat avocado toast but aspired to home ownership.
Today what we're seeing is that almost 30% of people who don't own homes believe that they will never own a home, and this is why many are so angry.
In terms of what we need to do, I think that what we need, particularly at the federal level, is leadership. We need thought leadership. We need the leadership to convene other levels of government and stakeholders. We need to do this in a really systematic way so that we can work together on the solutions that are required across levels of government to create incentives, to eliminate impediments and to work together so that we can prevent this kind of crisis from happening again. It's not going to be solved quickly or easily, and so once we do work through this—which will take many years—we should create permanent solutions so that this doesn't happen again.
One of the strong levers that the federal government has is infrastructure funding, and I'm really pleased to see that the government has combined the ministry of housing with the ministry of infrastructure. The program that exists for infrastructure is a very good start, and we'd like to see those projects accelerated along with the name of the program.
We also believe that the immigration system needs to be tweaked so that we have a better match for bringing in skills for homebuilding. Of course, we should be trying to attract the best and the brightest to this country, but we also need to be attracting the people who are going to build homes, and we should be looking at that system and making the changes that are appropriate to incentivize these skilled trades to come to Canada.
That said, we're never going to hire the 4,500 carpenters that we need every year. It's just not feasible, and we're going to have to find new, innovative ways to build homes. Again, the federal government is ideally suited to incentivize and to encourage research in this area so that more efficient ways of building homes can be done at scale.
Similarly, we need innovation in financing so that there are more rent-to-own incentives for longer-term mortgages with lower rates. There are all kinds of ways that we could be more innovative in financing.
Finally, what I would say on behalf of our realtor members is that they are on the ground—165,000 people on the ground—working with people every day as they aspire to find a roof over their heads. As much as we believe in home ownership, we believe rentals are extremely important. We're seeing in the numbers that purpose-built rentals are being built, but there's still a lot of the wrong kind of inventory being produced, and so we're very welcoming of initiatives like the removal of the GST on rentals, because we do need more rentals as part of the overall housing supply.
With that, I'll look forward to questions later.
Thank you.