I apologize. It is the rental construction financing incentive, which essentially is a CMHC program that allows for interest-free borrowing for the construction costs of rental housing.
This was a way of getting around the challenge of borrowing for the construction period, which in a condo is less of a challenge, because the monies from the pre-sale are used to finance the construction. Of course, in rental housing, because you're not selling anything, you don't have those pre-construction monies.
The rental construction financing program, which is referred to as RCFI, has actually been the program that has incentivized the rental housing that you have seen built over the past decade. It's been a really critical and important program.
However, it now needs to be recalibrated to do two things. It needs to be recalibrated to respond to higher interest rates, because today it's not viable. Today the program doesn't work. It was designed in a low interest rate environment. It needs to be restructured. That's the first change.
The second change is that it can be redesigned, and it should be redesigned, to specifically incentivize affordable housing and to link into municipal programs, like the one in the city of Toronto, where there are a series of incentives for building at 100% of AMR.
It depends on how that program is calibrated at CMHC. Essentially, just lowering the cost of borrowing for the construction period can, in turn, make projects like Maureen Fair's viable to build today.
