I want to pick up pretty much where that conversation left off.
I do think it's important to say that when we talk about balancing supply and demand in the housing market, while demand on paper has gone down, there aren't fewer people in Canada who need a place to live. I mean, demand for housing is completely inelastic. There's just as much demand for housing as there ever was. There are just more people living on the street who aren't bidding on houses because it's completely outside their financial possibility.
I think it is important for us to recall, as policy-makers, that the demand for housing is in fact equal to the number of people who live in Canada. The question of how many people are bidding on houses matters, and I'm not saying that isn't an important metric, but when we bring those two things into alignment, so that there's roughly a good number of people bidding on houses for the amount of supply, it doesn't mean that demand has gone down. It means that people are just displaced out of the market, and they're the people we're seeing living in encampments in our cities, on the streets and everywhere else. I think it's important for us just to bear in mind that we're not really talking about a balancing of demand and supply. We're talking about demand segments disappearing off the ledger and living on the streets.
One of the things that I think Canadians have really been challenged with when it comes to housing, if we think about the time before interest rates went up.... On low interest rates, certainly there is a school of thought that would say low interest rates were raising the sticker prices of houses and, in that sense, contributing to housing inflation. Since interest rates went up, people have really been feeling the pinch, because even though the sticker price may be coming down, their ongoing operating costs of owning a home and servicing the mortgage have also been important drivers of inflation.
Now, as we talk about a period on the horizon when interest rates will go down—albeit we're not sure when that's coming, exactly—are you concerned that it means housing will continue to drive inflation? As people can borrow more money with the same income, we'll go back to the race that was on before interest rates went up, where sticker prices are quickly escalating and also driving people out of the housing market.